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For his series, “Downwaste,” Jonathan Marquis visits glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park. He uses materials found at their melting edge to produce cyanotypes that visualize glacial melt and respond to glaciers as active agents of ice, rock, and snow. The cyanotype is a slow-reacting UV-sensitive photographic process dating to the 1840s. It was commonly used in contact printing and for reprography in the form of architectural blueprints. The chemical formula, which has changed very little since the 1840s, uses a solution of iron compounds, resulting in the recognizable monochromatic blue color from which the process takes its name. To make a cyanotype for Downwaste, Marquis coats a sheet of paper with cyanotype emulsion and hikes with it in a lightproof container through Glacier National Park to the melting edge of one of the twenty-six remaining glaciers. He then places the paper into the glacial runoff and distributes nearby rocks, ice chunks, and handfuls of glacial silt across the receptive surface. Under the sun, the cyanotype exposes, and the melting edge of a glacier draws itself. See “Downwaste” by Jonathan Marquis, pre-security in Terminal 3. https://bit.ly/3HNGF0H
This image was posted on July 14, 2023.