Community Cyanotype Workshop
New Orleans Healing Center
September 28, 2019
11am – 3pm

Free | All Ages | Please RSVP

PhotoNOLA, in partnership with New Orleans Healing Center, is pleased to present a free community workshop in celebration of World Cyanotype Day.  On Saturday, September 28, photographers and artists across the globe will gather in backyards, parking lots, galleries and parks to connect, create and celebrate the cyanotype, a simple and fun photographic process. People of all ages are invited to come learn and play.  
 
Learn from artists David Armentor, Natasha Sanchez, and Robert Schaefer about the historic process and how to create your own sun prints. Participants will use botanical specimens and other small objects to create one-of-a-kind photograms on light-sensitive fabric squares. Robert will share a brief visual presentation on the history and chemistry of the cyanotype, with examples for inspiration, at 11am and 1pm.

Cyanotype, a photographic printing process that results in graphic blue and white prints, is the perfect place to start an education in alternative photographic processes. Invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, not only is this medium low in cost and simple to master, it also yields beautiful and distinctive results.

Each participant will have the opportunity to create several 12×12″ cyanotypes. All are encouraged to leave behind one print on the theme of Land/Sea/Sky to be exhibited at the Healing Center, with other cyanotypes from around the world, during PhotoNOLA.
 
All supplies will be provided, but feel free to bring your own objects or foliage with interesting silhouettes to use in your compositions. Attendees are welcome to stay for the entire day, or drop in at any time from 11 till 3 to make a few prints. Please RSVP to help us plan for materials.
 

 
This workshop is presented in partnership with the New Orleans Healing Center and Blueprints on Fabric. You can read more about the origins of World Cyanotype Day here.
 
Instructors Bios

Gulf coast native David Armentor has been working in the photographic medium since 2002. He received a BA from Louisiana State University where he learned the craft of traditional  photographic print making. After graduation he taught photography classes for the Baton Rouge Arts Council and worked as a freelance photographer until moving to Seattle, WA, where he continued his photographic endeavors with the Benham Gallery as the gallery manager and guest artist. He now resides in New Orleans, LA, and is the founder of St Veronica’s Photography, an art consulting firm which specializes in alternative lens based processes.

Natasha Sanchez is a photographer, songwriter, and educator exploring, sharing and always inspired by the vast richness of our world.   Her photographic works use a variety of mediums to share her worldview – 35mm film, recycled photographic paper used to create lumen prints, plus a smidge of digital.  She chronicles her path in song by writing clever and thoughtful tunes that she performs as a solo acoustic act and in one-woman shows, which feature her storytelling and photography.  Natasha travels the world, oftentimes without leaving her home state. When she’s not searching for Himalaya, Louisiana, or making lumens in various locations, she lives and creates in New Orleans,  where she hosts songwriter nights and teaches photography workshops focusing on exploring the different ways to see and photograph the world. She performs and exhibits her work regularly. 
 

Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. began learning about photography while studying Architecture at Auburn University in Alabama, his home state, and continued to do so at the Technische Universität of Munich, Germany.  In photography he became a visual explorer in love with layering, his work focusing on a prominent interplay between spatial planes and a central image.
 
Schaefer’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, including one-person exhibitions in the Amerika Hauses in Munich, Hamburg, Hannover and Frankfurt, Germany; Kulturhaus in Graz, Austria; a 25-Year Retrospective at the Huntsville Museum of Art, in Alabama; the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi, and the Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh, India.
 
Schaefer’s work is held in collections including the Jule Collins Smith Musuem of Fine Art, The Museum of Modern Art, MFA,Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. His cyanotype work was included in the book Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-garde by Lyle Rexer (2010). In 2015, he completed a one-month artist residency in Can Serrat, outside of Barcelona, Spain producing cyanotypes of photographs taken in Barcelona.
 
Schaefer taught photography for twelve years at New York University before moving to New Orleans, LA in 2015. He continues to teach Cyanotype Workshops at The Penumbra Foundation/Center for Alternative Photography in New York City and now, sponsored by Penumbra, in New Orleans.  In November he is scheduled to instruct a Cyanotype Workshop at the New Orleans Museum of Art. His photography is represented by the Domeischel Gallery in New York City.