Cyanotype Prints

A cyanotype is made without a camera. An object is laid on paper coated with iron salts, put in the sun, and rinsed in water. What the object covered stays white; the rest turns Prussian blue. Sir John Herschel invented the process in 1842. Anna Atkins used it the following year to make the first book ever illustrated with photographs.

Two albums. The algae come from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843–1853 — the copy Atkins gave to Herschel himself, now in the New York Public Library. The ferns come from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853, made with her friend Anne Dixon and now in the Getty; that album's foreign half is a map of a correspondence network, with plants arriving pressed and flat from Jamaica, Ceylon, Brazil and New Jersey.

What these are. Giclée prints, made new from museum digitisations. They are not cyanotypes and are not sold as such — a cyanotype is a unique object made in sunlight, and the historic ones are in museums. What the pigment ink reproduces is the blue, the white silhouette, and the paper of the 1840s and 50s.

Every plate is reproduced whole, including the handwritten species names added to each sheet. Each product page names the holding institution and the accession number. Where the coated paper runs past the height the museum catalogues, we say so on the page and print the object, not the catalogue entry.

Twelve pigment inks on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, generous white border, ready to frame or mat. Unframed, shipped rolled in a tube.