Cyanotypes

Cyanotypes collects forty-four cameraless photographic prints by artist and composer Christian Marclay, made by unspooling cassette tape directly onto photosensitive paper.

Published by JRP/Ringier with Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida on the occasion of Marclay's exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, from September 8 to October 29, 2011, the book reproduces the full-page and foldout plates in the deep Prussian blue of the nineteenth-century cyanotype process. The tangled loops of unspooled tape read at once as musical notation and as abstract composition, recalling the poured lines of Jackson Pollock and the monochrome fields of Yves Klein. The volume includes a foreword by Margaret A. Miller and an essay by Noam M. Elcott.

Marclay, born in 1955 in San Rafael, California, and raised in Geneva, is best known for turning turntables and vinyl records into instruments, a practice that helped shape what later became known as turntablism. Cyanotypes extends that same interest in worn and obsolete recording media into a photographic process, treating the cassette tape as both subject and printing tool.