BLUEPRINT COLLABORATIONS WITH JOSE BETANCOURT

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Here is my Weily blueprint history and herstory.

But before I talk about photo arts now, I must bow to our great predecessors. The long blueprint story began in the eighteen hundreds when photography was an infant. First, of course, Henry Fox Talbot, who invented and explored the photo possibilities. He was astonishing. He encouraged and shared his vision with Anna Atkins, an important cyanotype explorer (the first to present this work in book form).

I am just bowing to our blue history as personal history, I will tell you of my grandmother, Sara Adler Weil. When she was a young thing, she took a glass plate photo of herself to her father’s office. He was the architect Dankmar Adler, in Chicago. Together they thought to put this glass image on his architectural blueprint paper and make her little girl portrait. You can see that I had to explore blueprint.

After summer I returned and went to Black Mountain College to study with Josef Albers. He was a professor in Germany’s Bauhaus, the exciting and irreverent school. Albers and his wife Anni were invited to teach at Black Mountain. It was a very art-oriented college. I was surprised when Bob R. appeared to study with Albers. We had a disciplined and exciting year there. Albers went on to teach at Yale. In the summer break Bob stayed with my family on their small island. In Connecticut we painted a lot and explored other creative activities. Bob and I talked about my childhood blueprint fun. We went together to an architecture supply place and bought a full roll of unexposed blueprint paper. My younger brother Jim was the smallest person there, so we had him lie on the paper surrounded by seaweed, shells, stones, and made a blueprint. We fixed it with water and peroxide. The blues were deep and varied. That summer we made many more. We enjoyed the exploration very much.

After our marriage in 1950 we moved to a small apartment in New York. Art school continued at the Art Students League. This gave Bob the much-needed G. I. Bill. We bought ultraviolet bulbs to replace sunshine and continued to make blueprints (cyanotypes). We felt pleased with this journey. In those days the art world was small and almost every artist knew each other and/or each other’s work. Bob wanted to share the cyanotype experience. In the spirit of that time, he contacted Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. We had an appointment. He was enthusiastic and put the blueprint “PAT” in a contemporary photography show. That was thrilling. We were still art students.