NEW DELFT FELLOW TRAVELERS

TILES

Over the past year, with NYC's Dutch roots in mind, I started placing my Fellow Travelers photos onto ceramic tiles, in reference to Delft tiles from the 17th-century Netherlands. Delft tiles—with their distinctive blue glaze on white background, a circular center, and decorative dingbats in the corners—often featured images of people from all walks of life as well as from fantasy— from ordinary farmers to exotic mermaids. Using a similar format and style, I wanted to display the rich and exciting diversity of New Yorkers.

cyanotype prints

In college I had made cyanotype prints, a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. I loved the immediacy. When I recently saw a colleague teaching the process to students at Queens College, it gave me the idea to combine this process with the Fellow Travelers and New Delft tiles. Seemed like a perfect marriage.

In the fall of 2015, I revisited printing cyanotypes. I made a traditional negative, painted a mixture of the chemical ammonium iron citrate and potassium tetracyanide onto Arches water color paper. I placed the negative over the prepared paper that I then covered with a glass panel. After a 15-minute exposure of late fall sun, I washed away the excess blue in a water bath to produce these prints.