361
are almost totally absent from all the major UK col-
lections. In contrast, some curators and practitioners in
France and the USA embraced the process. The still-life
photographs of Henri Le Secq printed in cyanotype are
well-represented in Paris, and have survived better than
his silver prints. There is also a set of fi ne ethnographic
studies of native North Americans by Edward Curtis at
the George Eastman House.
Cyanotype was used for some 19th-century docu-
mentary photographs; their subjects were large-scale
engineering projects, such as the construction of the
Forth Bridge (1883–90), the cutting of the Panama
Canal (1888–93), and various aspects of railway and
locomotive engineering. This print medium was a
natural choice, in view of the availability of blueprint
paper in quantity on such projects. Preparatory to their
publication in a ‘proper’ medium, the human and ani-
mal locomotion studies by Eadweard Muybridge were
proofed in cyanotype, revealing interesting details that
were suppressed in the fi nal published images. Edwin
Linley Sambourne made extensive use of cyanotypes to
assemble an archive of reference images for his Punch
cartoons.
Prussian blue reacts readily with alkalies: cyanotypes
are destroyed irreversibly in a few minutes by a solution
of only pH 9 (corresponding to a saturated solution of
chalk). To protect them, a slightly acidic environment
(i.e. a pH less than 7) is paramount—a requirement
which runs counter to the currently approved practices
of paper conservation, where alkaline buffering against
acid embrittlement is the norm. Cyanotypes also tend
to fade in strong light, but this is reversed in the dark;
their densities recover completely within a few days in
air, provided the light exposure has not been excessive.
Despite these vulnerabilities, cyanotypes are archivally
stable: fi ne specimens have endured well from the earli-
est days of photography, and the process continues to
attract artists today.
Mike Ware
See Also: Herschel, Sir John; Light-Sensitive
Chemicals; Smee, Alfred; Patents: Europe; Patents:
United Kingdom; Patents: United States; Marion and
Son, A.; Printing and Contact Printing; Photograms
of the Year (1888–1961); Botanical and Plant
Photography; Atkins, Anna; Book Illustrated with
Photographs; Pictorialism; Emerson, Peter Henry;
Still Lifes; Le Secq, Henri; Ethnography; Curtis,
Edward Sheriff; Documentary; Muybridge, Eadweard
James (Edward Muggeridge); and Sambourne, Edwin
Linley.Further Reading
Brown, George E., Ferric and Heliographic Processes, London:
Dawbarn and Ward, 1902.
Farber, Richard, Historic Photographic Processes, New York:
Allworth Press, 1998.
Hewitt, Barbara, Blueprints on Fabric, Loveland, Colorado:
Interweave Press, 1995.
James, Christopher, The Book of Alternative Photographic Pro-
cesses, Albany, New York: Delmar, 2002.
Lietze, Ernst, Modern Heliographic Processes, New York: van
Nostrand, 1888, reprinted by the Visual Studies Workshop,
Rochester, New York, 1974.
Schaaf, Larry J., Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna
Atkins, New York: Aperture, 1985.
Schaaf, Larry J., Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot and
the Invention of Photography, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992.
Ware, Mike, Cyanotype: the history, science and art of photo-
graphic printing in Prussian blue, London: Science Museum
and National Museum of Photography, Film and Television,
1999.
Wilson, John L., “The Cyanotype,” in Technology and Art: the
birth and early years of photography, Michael Pritchard, ed.,
Bath: Historical Group, Royal Photographic Society, 1990.