Cyanotype Intensive with Sean McFarland - Spring 2025

Join artist Sean McFarland for this two-day workshop exploring the historical, conceptual, and practical applications of the cyanotype process in contemporary photographic practice. Participants will learn how to prepare and print digital negatives, mix chemistry and coat paper, exposure techniques, print processing and print finishing. Participants will be asked to bring a selection of possible images to work on ahead of the workshop and walk away with foundational knowledge of the cyanotype process.

DAY ONE

• Presentation and discussion about the historical and contemporary use of the cyanotype process
• Prepare cyanotype chemistry and coat paper for printing
• Apply digital processing techniques to maximize and pre-visualize the tonal range of the cyanotype print
• Print digital negatives
• Expose, process, and evaluate first prints

DAY TWO

• Demonstration and discussion of post processing, archival storage, and presentation of cyanotypes
• Review prints from day one
• Prepare cyanotype chemistry and coat paper for printing
• Make needed adjustments to digital files and produce new digital negatives
• Expose and process final prints

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:
Sean McFarland's photographs, sculptures, drawings, videos, and books examine records of time, landscape, and spirituality. Working from a self-generated archive comprising tens of thousands of items, McFarland’s practice is a continuous revisiting of site, image, object, and experience. Materials such as silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes, drawings, rocks, desert sage dust, and glass are combined to make photographs, collage, and sculpture. The resulting works are at once a meditation on place, phenomena, how we are present and how we remember.

Sean earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BS from Humboldt State University. His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Visual Studies Workshop; San Francisco Camerawork; and White Columns. Group exhibitions include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; George Eastman Museum; Aperture; Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Milwaukee Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art; George Eastman Museum; City and County of San Francisco; and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

His awards include the SECA Award - SFMOMA, the Eureka Fellowship, the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship.

Sean lives in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

Images © Sean McFarland