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Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Printing with Light

When I lived in Edinburgh, for a time I shared a house on Calton Hill, just a couple of doors down from 'Rock House' where David Octavius Hill and  Robert Adamson pioneered photographic techniques in the mid 19th century.  The British Photographer and Botanist, Anna Atkins, working at around the same time as Hill and Adamson, used the cyanotype process to illustrate an entire book - possibly the first book to use photographic illustrations.
I've always been fascinated with photography, particularly early photography and the cyanotype process.  After some browsing and researching, I recently found an excellent cyanotype kit that provides the light sensitive chemicals that you then combine and use to coat paper or fabric.  So I did some experimenting and came up with these.

(Feather and Jacaranda leaf, printed on cloth. 2018)



Such a beautiful and simple process, capturing images with light.  There is a magic working in this way and I can get a sense of how the early pioneers of photography would have felt, seeing images emerge for the first time.  

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