Hi again! In my last post, I promised to talk a bit about the new medium I have added to my repertoire for expressing Karooness. I have been thinking a lot about that sense of nostalgia that the Karoo seems to evoke in those who have been captivated by it. (The Karoo is such an extreme environment, and not everyone ‘gets it’, reactions seem to be as extreme as the place itself, you either love it or hate it, I don’t recall meeting anyone who is neutral!) But if you are one of its devotees, you will understand the feeling I mean… how as soon as you leave, you look back with a longing to return, and experience that sense of stepping back in time all over again. It is that mood which I have been striving for in my work, and when I stumbled across some cyanotypes on Instagram while recovering from Covid at the beginning of the year, I knew this was just what I needed. So the last months have been an intensive study/experimental period, during which my old methods and this new one have merged into a new way for me to continue Celebrating Karooness.
So what is cyanotype? In a nutshell, it is one of the earliest methods of reproducing photographic images, developed (get the pun?) by John Herschel in 1842. He discovered that a mixture of 2 chemicals, ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, was light sensitive when exposed to UV light (sunlight). It produces archival prussian blue prints, when done on the correct paper, and can be toned and manipulated with various easily obtained chemicals (usually found in one’s kitchen) to subtle shades of brown (Black Tea) , aubergine (Green tea), charcoal (coffee) and golden yellow (Soda Ash). It is a remarkably simple process, which turns out to be very complicated and nuanced by so many factors, for example paper weight, texture, pH, water quality, strength of sunlight etc.
Unlike conventional photographic printing, done through an enlarger, this is essentially a form of contact printing, so the size of the image is determined by the size of your negative, or the objects you lay on the paper before exposing to direct sunlight (or UV lamps.) Its first use was mainly for photograms of plants, and these have become very popular again. It then went into general use for blue-prints, but failed to gain popularity initially, as a means of printing conventional photographs. A well known photographer at the time commented, “No one but a vandal would print a landscape in red, or in cyanotype.” (Peter Henry Emerson: Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1889) Naturally this piqued my interest and I immediately wanted to print landscapes in cyanotype!
The first challenge is sourcing the 2 key chemicals in South Africa (well specifically in a small Karoo dorpie in SA!) You can get kits online with a small bottle of each, in the correct ratio. They are imported from the USA, so take a while to get here and are not cheap, so getting them when you are not sure about whether you will like or continue with the process is a gamble. Now that I know I am going to pursue it happily, I have sourced bulk supplies of the chemicals, one from Joburg and the other from New York, so again it took a while, but now I am good to go.
Another challenge was sourcing big enough Acetate transparencies that could handle the heat of laser printing. The biggest I have found so far have been A3, so i have also worked on ways to join them for the bigger contact prints.
Once I had built up a body of work, some have been exhibited and sold as they stand, on paper, and others were attached to boards and taken further with ink drawing and encaustic, to become photo-encaustics.
Because each print is hand made, and the conditions are so variable, it is possible to re-use the same negative many times, and each outcome will be unique.
So that is a very brief glimpse into where this new (but very old) printing method is becoming an integral part of my ongoing love affair with expressing Karooness! Cheers till next time!