Photography Without a Camera: Advanced Class Creates Cyanotype Prints

The process was part of a unit on cameraless photography. Instead of capturing images on film inside a camera, contact prints such as cyanotypes are made by positioning objects directly on coated paper before exposing the paper to light. Cyanotypes are specifically sensitive to UV light, so they are often exposed outdoors in sunlight. Afterward, in water, the cyanotype coating rinses off from the places where objects obstructed the light from reaching the paper, while the parts of the paper exposed to the light turn a deep blue. Translucent objects or shadows yield lighter shades of blue, and fully opaque objects yield darker blue. 

At Rivers, students’ first exposure to photography is during the Upper School’s Visual Arts Foundation Program, when students cycle through the four core disciplines offered at Rivers—ceramics, drawing, photography, and sculpture—spending a quarter of the school year in each class. Over the course of Foundations and Intermediate Photography with Lane, students have the opportunity to explore digital as well as analog photography—the photo classroom in The Revers Center has an attached darkroom.

This semester’s Advanced Photo class had three students: Lola Boudreau ’26, Maylea Harris ’26, and Kyle Nahabedian ’26. Boudreau said she was originally drawn to photography class because she enjoyed taking black and white film photos on walks around Boston. “In this class, I’ve really liked how we’ve gotten to try different things more than just taking photos,” said Boudreau. “With the cyanotypes, we’re experimenting a bit more.” Nahabedian noted that one of the first things that comes to mind when he thinks of photography is cameras, so exploring a cameraless photographic process was totally new.

Harris had seen cyanotypes before Advanced Photo but didn’t know what they were called. Now, she’s already planning to continue her work with cyanotypes next year in the Special Program in Visual Arts, a new course for the 2025–26 year open to juniors and seniors that will combine group discussion and time working independently in any medium over the course of the full year. Harris hopes to combine her interest in the cyanotype process with her interest in fashion, making cyanotype prints on fabric instead of paper. 

For their cyanotype project in Advanced Photo, the students used found and created objects for their prints and experimented with different applications of the light-sensitive coating, giving their prints a painterly quality. Harris and Boudreau also played around with cutting their prints, and Harris stitched some of her prints together and used 35mm film negatives she’d previously worked with in the darkroom for others. Nahabedian experimented with printing plants and leaves, and Boudreau worked a lot with flowers, both harkening back to some of the earliest cyanotypes ever made by the botanist Anna Atkins, who the students learned about as part of their introduction to the process.

At the end of the cameraless unit, the students all submitted beautiful prints—but for this group, the project ended up being less about final results and more about exploration. “A lot of high school students’ academic lives focus on the outcome, the product,” Lane commented. “The fact that they were able to embrace open-endedness and experimentation over perfectionism was special and rewarding, and much more true to life.” 

Lane added that this experience is a good example of what can happen when juniors and seniors keep art in their academic schedule. “At that level, the skills are there already—it’s more about getting immersed in a process and a concept and finding their voice as unique individuals,” she concluded.