The British are well renowned for our obsession with the weather, being a small island whose climate is heavily influenced by the tropical Gulf Stream and the biting Atlantic that surrounds it. Being both British and a photographer, the colour blue is an intrinsically important aspect of my interests. Blue harkens the end of Winter as the skies gradually clear upon a usually grey England; a speck of blue on the horizon from the passenger seat of a car as the warmer sea reflects the unusually vivid Summer holiday sky is a memory that must be inherently part of the British psyche.

Another enthusiast of the shorter wavelength area of the spectrum, and an intrepid inventor, ‘Horace Bénédict do Saussure’ is known for his ingenious temperature measuring machines but Saussure is also the father of a very interesting contraption called a ‘Cyanometer’. Like many before, and after him, Saussure pondered the skies above him which translated into a scientific visual language of sorts; a kind of category system used to document the “blueness” of the sky at different altitudes. The Cyanometer may seem like a romantic notion by today’s scientific standards but in 1786 such a thing was at the forefront of academic exploration albeit a disarmingly beautiful endeavour.

The boundaries between art and science have always been somewhat blurred, that is depending on how one subscribes to the concepts of both entities - both can be described as searching for, or indeed recognising something unseen. The colour blue is also very important within the history of photography; amongst some of the earliest methods of light sensitive forms of printing are a deep, prussian blue. The process and the resulting print is called a ‘cyanotype’ - invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842 and made popular by English Botanist Anna Atkins from 1843 onwards. A botanist in theory but also hailed (if not disputed) as the first female photographer, Anna Atkins used the reproducing quality of the cyanotype to categorise certain species of Plant matter, the first and most famous publication being ’Photographs of British Algae’. This made Atkins not only the first ever female photographer but also the creator of the first book ever to be illustrated with photographs. The images are not only grandiose in vibrancy but there is a real sense of conviction that is lent to the work due to it’s inherently scientific nature of collecting and searching. The ‘Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition’, of which Atkins took part in, describes the work as “illustrating the burgeoning art-science of photography”. The double barrel “art-science” may seem an oxymoron to those who distinguish the two but in a different breath, one can see the beauty of both pursuits and the wonders that lie at the beginning and end of both endeavours. There is a poetic element to photography that I find completely encapsulating as it manages to capture physical objects in a chemical reaction or a digital reading that appears to be purely documentarian but whilst doing such, rendering them anew as a separate icon in a way similar to a painting or a dream. 

The aesthetic of cyanotypes are rather ethereal as the viewer is presented with a recognisable object yet it appears as a negative shadow ‘sans-object’ which makes the image look suspended or submerged in some way. The reality is, we do not recognise the object itself but the absence of something that casts that shadow, similar to the way in which scientists discover black holes. The three things that are a necessary part of both art and science’s foundations are mystery, exploration and experimentation; all lead into the unknown and can result in something never-before discovered.

I am going to take part (and help manage) a cyanotype workshop at Open Eye Gallery tomorrow with the help of Rachel Brewster from Little Vintage Photography. The workshop is part of BBC Get Creative Day and will take place in the outside area of the gallery so I am hoping for good weather! The event is free so feel free to drop in and take part if you happen to be in the city. You can find us by the water.

Further reading, if you are interested:

http://www.openculture.com/2016/01/first-book-to-use-photographic-illustrations.html

http://unblinkingeye.com/Cyanomicon.pdf

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/October/SaussuresCyanometer.asp

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/photographic-processes/

Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, Vol 1 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), p441