The cyanotype process, invented by Sir John Herschel in 1842, produces images in a distinctive Prussian blue. It's a contact printing process: objects are placed directly on light-sensitive paper and exposed to UV light.
What emerges is not a photograph in the traditional sense, but a photogram—a direct record of light and shadow, presence and absence. The process is slow, deliberate, and irreversible.
In this way, cyanotype serves as a useful metaphor for how we might approach digital archiving. Not as a process of perfect replication, but as one of intentional selection and transformation.
The digital archive promises permanence through redundancy—multiple copies, distributed storage, constant migration to new formats. But this promise often obscures a deeper fragility: the dependence on infrastructure, on institutions, on the continued existence of compatible systems.
The cyanotype, by contrast, is self-contained. Once fixed, it requires no special equipment to view, no software to decode, no power source to access. It is simply there, a physical object that will fade slowly over decades if exposed to light, but will otherwise persist.
Perhaps what we need is not more perfect digital preservation, but more thoughtful selection. Not everything needs to be saved. Not everything should be instantly accessible. Some things might be better served by slower, more deliberate processes of remembering.
The cyanotype teaches us that permanence and process are not opposites, but partners. The image is permanent precisely because the process is irreversible. There is no undo, no layers, no non-destructive editing. What you make is what remains.
In our current moment of infinite digital malleability, perhaps there is value in embracing constraints. In choosing processes that force us to be more intentional, more careful, more present.
The blue of the cyanotype is not the blue of the sky or the sea, though it evokes both. It is its own blue—chemical, artificial, yet somehow natural. A blue that exists nowhere else, that can only be made through this specific process.
This is what we lose when we prioritize perfect reproduction over meaningful transformation: the possibility of creating something that could not exist any other way.