Robert Rauschenberg turned a woman’s shadow into a Japanese screen. A dark circle in the upper-right corner comes from the UV light used to make the Cyanotype.
While I’ve used many kinds of negatives for my Cyanotype prints – including corkscrews, chopsticks, and most controversially, birth control pills – I’ve not yet used human bodies to make my work.
Artists have drawn, painted, and sculpted the body for millennia, so it’s only natural we’d transfer this desire to new media. Cyanotype prints are small or huge, depending on the size of the object/negative blocking the light.
Rauschenberg experimented with Cyanotypes, and naturally his female silhouettes proved to be popular – it takes only a glance at art history to see few collectors can resist a naked woman, even if she’s just a silhouette.
Click here to see him making a Cyanotype like the print above. (May be NSFW)
