Anna Atkins, the 19th century botanist and photographer whose Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is widely regarded as the first photographic book, made her images by placing algae directly onto paper coated with a light-sensitive solution. Where the plant blocked the ultraviolet light, the paper remained white. Everywhere else, it turned the deep Prussian blue that gives the process its name. At the center of each image, the algae’s fronds produced their own negative.
Emily A. Sprague first encountered cyanotypes while shooting film photography in her bathtub around 2018, when she was experimenting with leaking light into film and altering development times and temperatures. As opposed to her…
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The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is… patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.