Ice Lenses

The cyanotype process is almost as old as photography itself. Invented by John Herschel in 1842, it was the process used by Anna Atkins the following year to produce the first book illustrated by photographic means (Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions), several months before the appearance of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. The simplicity of the cyanotype process lies in the fact that, once sensitised, the cyanotype is simply processed after exposure in a single step, by washing in running water. This simple, single step lends itself to a variety of applications (as does the availability of commercially prepared cyanotype paper) and, as a process, it is often introduced to children and used to create simple silhouettes of natural objects. It has also seen a resurgence of interest in recent years by artists and photographers, drawn to its unique properties.

During the heatwave in the summer of 2018, I conceived of using the process with the simplest economy of means to create an image that would be a recording of its own making. On the invention of photography, its progenitors were at a loss as to where exactly they could rightfully situate their own agency in the making of a photograph due to the mechanical (optical, chemical) processes involved. Both Talbot and Daguerre used very similar language in trying to define what was happening when a photograph was made: it was a ”spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura" (Daguerre) and a "Process by Which Natural Objects May Be made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil" (Talbot, both quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, 1997). Underlying these accounts, there appears to be something of the uncanny which first struck the early photographers, and commentators on photography, the idea of 'nature drawing itself'. Photography’s mechanical means was and has been for many years throughout its history a key contention over photography’s claims to the status of art.

This ‘spontaneous’ generation of the photographic image was very much in my mind in the initial experiments I made with lenses made from ice. Given the nature of the material and processes involved, it should be possible to have a cyanotype print produce itself - both expose and process itself once set up to run, like a science experiment, a contained process with minimal intervention. Water, in the form of ice, would both provide the image, and by melting, this would develop the image it had thus made. For the form this ice could take, I thought of a simple hemispheric convex lens, placed in direct contact with the cyanotype paper; this would not produce a defined image itself, but would simply collect, absorb and refract light to produce an image of itself (the hemispheric form also mimicked the appearance of the sky, perceived as a dome above). The first tests I made in direct sunlight proved that the light was too intense; the best results were made in open shade on a bright sunny day. With temperatures around 30ºC in the shade, the ice melted quickly enough in relation to the relatively short exposure times needed to form an image - and develop this out before the paper became completely over exposed.

The process needs to be perfected: the images on this post were not entirely developed by the melting ice, as the lenses themselves did not contain enough water to do this, although it did pool in the middle of the paper and develop the image area itself; one can see the extent of this development in the marks around the image of the lenses themselves, with the rest of the cyanotype paper requiring additional washing through by hand: from the results of these initial tests, I intend to explore some adjustments which should then enable the whole process, once set up, to ‘spontaneously’ generate a cyanotype print itself.

Nicholas Middleton