Why I Make Cyanotypes (And What That Has to Do With Your Portrait)
When you step in front of my camera, I am there with you. Vulnerable, present, paying attention. I know what it feels like to be on that side of the lens because I step in front of my own camera all the time. It is part of my art-making process: when I need a figure in the frame and I am the one who is there, I become both subject and creator. That relationship, the one between the person making the image and the person being made visible, is something I carry into every session I photograph. It is because of what I have learned standing on both sides of the camera that I want to tell you something about the way I work.
I make cyanotypes.
If you have seen my fine art work, you may already know this. If you found me through headshots or brand photography, this might be new. Either way, it matters to both of us more than you might expect.
What is a cyanotype, exactly?
The cyanotype is one of the oldest photographic processes in existence. Invented in 1842 by the English scientist Sir John Herschel, it was originally intended for reproducing mathematical tables. Architects later adapted it to copy technical drawings: those flat, blue-on-white sheets known as blueprints. Photographers in the field used it to make proof prints before committing to a final image.
The process itself is beautifully simple. You coat a surface, paper or vellum or fabric, with a light-sensitive iron solution. You place objects or a negative on top. You expose it to UV light, usually sunlight. Then you wash it in water, and the image that emerges is a deep, saturated Prussian blue.
No darkroom required. No enlarger. Just chemistry, light, and time.
That simplicity is part of what draws me to it. The work develops slowly, in stages, each part of the process asking something of you before it gives something back. I have always been drawn to processes like this: ones where the making is as layered as the meaning.
What I am actually investigating
My cyanotype series, What Was Held, explores memory and material. Specifically, it asks a question I find endlessly interesting: what is a photograph, really, and what do we ask of it?
We treat photographs as documents. As proof. As containers for the past. We reach for them when memory starts to blur, when a face or a place or a particular quality of afternoon light starts to fade. Photographs have become blueprints for memory itself.
But a photograph is also a constructed thing. A frame chosen, a moment selected, a story shaped by who was holding the camera and what they decided to include. The image that feels like truth is also, always, a point of view.
In What Was Held, I work with this tension directly. I paint vellum sheets with cyanotype chemistry, then layer botanical images, silhouetted figures cut from magazines, vintage book pages, pencil marks, and gouache. Each piece builds up like memory does: not in one clean layer but in accumulation, revision, and the occasional thing that cannot quite be made out anymore. The finished images read like film stills, or like a scene half-remembered from a dream. They sit somewhere between fact and fiction, past and present, document and invention.
That is intentional. That is the point.
Here is what this has to do with your portrait
When I photograph you, I am not just making a likeness. I am trying to make something true.
There is a version of portrait photography that is purely technical: correct exposure, flattering light, a reliable smile. That version exists, and it has its uses. But it is not what I am after, and it is probably not what you are after either, or you would not be reading this.
What I care about in a portrait session, whether it is a brand session or a headshot or a personal portrait, is the same thing I care about in a cyanotype: the layered reality of a person. The way someone carries their history in the way they hold their shoulders. The thing that is almost visible in the moment just before someone stops performing for the camera and simply is themselves. That is the image I am trying to make. The one that feels, when you look at it later, less like a picture taken and more like something true that was finally seen.
Fine art teaches you to look differently. It asks you to slow down, to stay with something, to let meaning accrue rather than forcing it. That is what I bring to every session. Not a checklist or a formula, but a genuine curiosity about who you are and what your image might hold.
Sacred Fish, cyanotype and acrylic on watercolor paper, 11×17”, 2026. On view and available for purchase at Waterway Arts in Turners Falls, MA as part of the show Enough: A Collaboration inspired by the written word.
Why this matters if you are considering collecting my work
If you are drawn to What Was Held or my other fine art work, I want you to understand what you are bringing home. These are not decorative objects. They are investigations. Each piece carries a question about memory, about the photograph as a document, about the gap between what we remember and what actually happened.
They are also, in the oldest sense of the word, blueprints: light-touched, time-made, irreproducible in the way that all handmade things are irreproducible. The cyanotype process does not allow for perfect copies. Each piece is its own.
That feels right to me. Memory does not make perfect copies either.
A note on why I make art
Art is a form of dialogue. Something moves from artist to object to viewer, and the viewer carries their own reflections into the world. The work I make is not finished when I finish making it. It is finished, in a way, when it meets you.
That is also true of a portrait. The photograph I make of you will mean something I cannot entirely predict or control. You will see things in it I will not see. You will carry it into a future I will not be part of.
That is not a loss. That is the whole point.
Interested in fine art prints? The What Was Held series is currently showing at Northampton Center for the Arts (April 10–25) and Sacred Fish is on view at Waterway Arts in Turners Falls (opening April 3, 5-8 pm). You are welcome to reach out with questions or to discuss collecting.
Ready to explore what a portrait session looks like when it is made with this kind of care? Book a consultation.
About this post: Nikki Gardner is a fine art and portrait photographer based in Northampton, MA. This post explains the cyanotype photographic process, its history, and how Gardner's fine art practice, specifically her series What Was Held, informs her approach to portrait, headshot, and brand photography sessions. Topics include: alternative photographic processes, the relationship between memory and image-making, and what clients can expect from a portrait session with an artist-photographer. Gardner's work is currently exhibited at Northampton Center for the Arts and Waterway Arts in Turners Falls, MA.
