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| Jan van Leeuwen was
born in 1932 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A salesman, office manager, and
buyer for trading companies, his early photographs were images
of the products he represented. In 1986, he began to seriously
study photography and attended a workshop devoted to self-portraits. The
workshop greatly impacted his photography and from that point forward
the self-portrait became his main subject. A well-known Dutch
photo-collector introduced van Leeuwen to the cyanotype process. Cyanotypes are photographs that are typically produced without a camera. They are also referred to as photograms or sunprints. The process was created in the first half of the 1800s and was used by photographers in a variety of ways including to record botanical specimens. Objects are placed on top of a piece of light-sensitive paper. When exposed to light, the areas covered by the objects are unexposed and remain light in color while the areas around the objects are exposed to the light and darken in color. The paper is then developed and fixed. Cyanotypes refer specifically to photograms that are produced on paper treated with chemicals that produces a brilliant blue (“cyan”) color when exposed and washed. To create his cyanotype images, van Leeuwen uses a large format camera to produce a negative. The exposure time is about two minutes. To achieve the final cyanotype, the negative is contact-printed with a treated paper in a light box. The final cyanotype positive is produced after an exposure of eight to ten hours.  (For Grades K-3) Do you think this is a photograph? Does it look like photographs you have at home? What shapes do you see in this picture? |
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Jan van Leeuwen |
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