dear anna

In her new images, Cecilia Ömalm continues to experiment with the cyanotype technique and, with the help of bleaching and plant dyeing, has created an earthy color scale with tones of umber and ochre. During Gallery Weekend Stockholm November 10-12, we present an exhibition of new cyanotypes by Cecilia Ömalm at ed. art on Hagagatan.

Cecilia Ömalm is one of those who has driven the return of cyanotype as an artistic form of expression in Sweden in recent years. From having been a relatively forgotten 19th-century photographic technique, today many people recognize the cyanotype's main characteristic: the strong blue color created by iron salts.

In her new pictures, Cecilia Ömalm has experimented further with the technique and, with the help of bleaching and plant dyeing, has created an earthy color scale with tones of umber and ochre. The pictures are photograms, that is, works created by the artist arranging objects directly on the paper. Both objects and shadows leave “imprints” in the surface of the paper when illuminated with UV light, creating a negative image. The exhibition partly consists of pictures that clearly show which object has been used, in the spirit of the 19th-century botanist and pioneer Anna Atkins. But there is also a whole series of more abstract pictures where we as viewers cannot immediately understand what we are seeing. It becomes a play with positive and negative, image and copy.

The title Dear Anna refers to Anna Atkins (1799-1871), botanist and photographer and creator of the world's first photo book Photographs of British Algae , 1843.

See all works by Cecilia Ömalm

Herbal blends in Cecilia Ömalm's studio

Cecilia Ömalm's thoughts behind the exhibition Dear Anna:

About 180 years ago, astronomer Sir John Herschel invented an early photographic method that came to be known as cyanotype. By mixing two iron salts; ammonium ferricitrate and potassium ferricyanide, a UV-sensitive solution is created that is coated on paper that is allowed to dry without light and then contact copied with negatives or objects in sunlight. The exposure is interrupted, developed and fixed by rinsing the image in a water bath and an image in blue scale that stands the test of time appears. The blue color continues to deepen for up to two days before it is completely finished. The method came to be used primarily for copying architectural and technical drawings, hence the name blueprints.

Herschel's next door neighbor was Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a botanist and photographer who had an unusually scientific education for a woman. Her mother died when she was only one year old and she grew up with a father who was a chemist, mineralogist and zoologist. She was close to her father and even illustrated some of his texts and translations with beautiful and detailed pencil drawings. Through her father, she gained useful contacts and was admitted to The London Botanical Society in 1839. Atkins married a wealthy merchant and had no children, which gave her time to invest in personal interests, something that would hardly have happened to the same extent if she had been relegated to a more traditional family life.

Herschel introduced her to his new blue method and she began copying her algae collection into a composite work with hundreds of images that resulted in a book of 13 copies, Photographs of British Algae, 1843. A copy is still preserved at The New York Library and as recently as this spring, the book publisher Taschen released a large book about Atkins' life's work that not only contains images of algae but also various ferns and other cyanotypic collaborations with her good friend Anne Dixon.

Historically, Atkins was the creator of the first photographic book, something that did not receive much attention, probably because she was a woman. In the 1890s, a collector was writing about her first book and mockingly suggested that the initials AA might as well have stood for Anonymous Amateur. Perhaps the collector was bothered by the seductively beautiful images and dismissed them as banal. He was quickly rebuked by the director of the British Museum of Natural History, who argued that Atkins' photographic work had not only artistic but also scientific value.

When I first became interested in cyanotypes almost 10 years ago, Atkins’s images were the first to pop up in my searches. I was delighted to see a female figure in the early history of photography and I eventually started adding the hashtag #dearannaatkins to my Instagram account @ironsaltarchives as a tribute to her hard work. My first work for ed. art was released in 2015 and was an interpretation of the moon with a connection to the astronomical founder of cyanotypes. Now it feels fitting that my collection of cyanotypes on display (some of which are botanically tinted) be named after the woman who truly developed his invention.

Cecilia Ömalm, Stockholm, autumn 2023

The image at the top is taken from Anna Atkins' book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, from 1843.

Cecilia Ömalm studied at the International Center for Photography in New York in the late 1990s. Since the mid-2000s, she has had a successful career on the Swedish art scene, with a large number of exhibitions and works that can be found in the collections of the Moderna Museet, among others.