CYANOTYPES
Thomas Mailaender

175 years ago, while making cyanotypes of plants and seaweed, the British botanist Anna Atkins simultaneously became the inventor of the photo book. Over the course of 10 years she collected and created cyanotypes of plant specimens gathered on the southwest coast of England. Every image, and thus each book, was different. With his book Cyanotypes, Thomas Mailaender celebrates both the artist and the photo book medium. He re-imagines this process by applying it to a selection of images from The Fun Archive, his personal collection of images gathered on the Internet over the course of 10 years. Teetering on the edge between performance and a workshop production, this editorial project took ten people and two weeks to realize. 76 x 56 cm prints were realized on 700 sheets of Vélin d’Arches deckle-edged paper. The cyanotypes were then cut to create 2800 pages that make up these books. They were trimmed, assembled at random and then bound at the Reliure du Centre studio in Limoges. Every book cover is unique, printed on Buckram Couvotec canvas. Each of the 30 copies of this 160 pages book also features a unique UV-photogram print created by the artist.