My birthday came, as birthdays will, a few weeks ago. My children view birthday presents as a challenge: What can they give me that will produce many entertaining stories at the family Zoom? It’s even better if they can come up with a creative challenge to make me sweat. Listening to my son’s stories of his graduate committee, I feel like this present, ultimately, is a small dose of his experience in a photography MFA program. “What work am I making? Where is it going? What does it have to say?”
“OK,” says the reader, “enough. — What Is It?”
Cyanotypes. A relatively simple historical photographic process. Coat paper with some poisonous chemicals. Shine bright light through a negative onto the paper. A quick dip in a bit of hydrogen peroxide, and:
What have we here? To begin with, someone had to spread a solution over a piece of paper evenly, with a minimum of brush strokes. Ignoring the evidence of poor manual dexterity for a moment, what is compelling about this image? It had better not be a pure moment of faux-hipster craft nostalgia. (I am not sure what is plus faux: the idea of me as a hipster, or the hipster trend of incompetent craft masquerading as authenticity (‘Those are artisanal burned spots …’)).
Here is the world seen through a blue haze. Look closely, though, and the details are still there. Seeing is an active process: there’s no LED display in our head; our brains construct our visual experience from the signals of our retinas. ‘Reading’ this image might be pulling some of that unconscious process into our conscious experience. “Oh, look, reflections!” Let’s try another.
A diesel locomotive is a large, solid, noisy, even bright object. Refract it through this process, and it floats in another space. Compare to:
Expecting some comparison? Some rejection of the later in favor of the former? If you were thinking that I’ve completely caught the bug, and have constructed an entirely blueish esthetic model of my future photography …
You’re probably not thinking that. Most of you know that I’m too distractible of a magpie to go there, or too far from any clear vision of why I’m making these images in the first instance. I am very fond of these near-infrared trains as well, and they are about as concrete and present as the cynaotype was abstracted and remote.
So I’ll leave you with a conceptual view of my first day of cyanotypes, brushstrokes and all: