Cyanotype as a “Slow Technology”
Cyanotype as a “Slow Technology” — Is It Worth Slowing Photography Down Today?
Can a historical photographic process be more than simply a way of making an image?
This is the question explored by Yi Xia, Jianrui Zhao, and Chihiro Sato in their paper “Cyanotype as Slow Technology for Japanese Older Adults,” presented at the 2026 ACM Creativity and Cognition conference.
The authors approach cyanotype not as a historical technique to be revived for its own sake, but as a form of “slow technology” — a technology that deliberately introduces time, waiting, material interaction, and reflection into the process of making an image.
Their study was based on four workshops held in a suburban Japanese community for older adults. Participants selected and arranged materials, exposed their compositions to UV light, rinsed the prints, and then discussed and titled the resulting images. The study suggests that these intervals were not merely practical delays. They became part of the creative experience itself.
In digital photography, an image can appear almost instantly. Cyanotype works differently. The material must first be prepared, objects arranged, the image exposed to light, and then — crucially — one has to wait. Only after washing the paper does the final image emerge.
Here, waiting is not wasted time.
It becomes part of the creative process.
The authors argue that this slower rhythm creates opportunities for observation, conversation, reflection, and meaning-making. The image is not simply produced; it gradually comes into being through a sequence of physical and social interactions.
The paper also draws attention to the unpredictability of the process. The final result depends on light, exposure time, the arrangement of objects, the characteristics of the materials, and numerous small variables. Uncertainty does not necessarily represent a technical failure. Instead, it can become part of the meaning of the image.
And this is where the paper becomes more interesting than a study of cyanotype alone.
A similar approach can be observed among contemporary photographers who work with historical processes.
Mac Cosgrove-Davies has worked for decades with gum bichromate, cyanotype, and other early photographic processes. Yaroslav Golubchyk combines gum bichromate, cyanotype, gum oil, oil printing, and other techniques, treating their differences as a field for experimentation. Ian Phillips McLaren, after years of working in fashion and portrait photography, turned toward pictorialism and processes such as albumen, cyanotype, and gum bichromate.
In these practices, historical technique is not simply a form of stylistic quotation or a kind of photographic costume.
It becomes a tool for contemporary artistic expression.
This suggests a broader proposition:
The value of historical photographic processes does not necessarily lie in returning to an obsolete technology. It may lie in bringing back into photography the time, uncertainty, materiality, and social interaction that have been reduced by the automation and acceleration of digital image-making.
This question becomes particularly relevant today.
Images can now be generated, edited, reproduced, and distributed almost instantaneously. Generative AI pushes this development even further, separating the production of an image from many of the physical actions that historically defined photographic practice.
In this context, a historical process can function almost as a form of resistance.
Not necessarily resistance to digital technology itself, but to the assumption that faster always means better.
Cyanotype makes the passage of time visible.
The image does not appear all at once. It develops through exposure, washing, drying, and the gradual revelation of the final surface. The process creates a temporal distance between intention and result.
That distance matters.
It creates room for uncertainty.
It creates room for interpretation.
And perhaps most importantly, it creates room for the photographer to encounter an image rather than simply produce one.
Gum bichromate is an even more striking example.
Each additional pigment layer, each wash, and each intervention by hand leaves a trace. The making of the image is not hidden behind the finished surface. The time required to produce the image becomes physically inscribed in the image itself.
This is one of the reasons why the renewed interest in historical and alternative photographic processes should not be understood simply as nostalgia.
It may instead represent an attempt to reconsider what photography has become — and what it may have lost through acceleration.
The question is therefore no longer only:
How can we make photographs more quickly?
It can also be:
What do we lose when photography becomes too fast?
Perhaps what is lost is not simply a particular technique or a certain kind of craftsmanship.
Perhaps we lose time itself as a constituent of the photographic image.
And perhaps this is why “slow photography” matters today: because slowing down the process may allow us to recover something that technological efficiency has progressively removed — the experience of waiting, handling, uncertainty, and being physically present with the image while it comes into existence.
The study by Xia, Zhao, and Sato offers an empirical starting point for thinking about this possibility. Their research does not suggest that cyanotype is inherently superior to digital photography. Rather, it demonstrates that a slower photographic process can create particular temporal, material, and relational conditions for reflection and meaning-making.
That may be the most interesting lesson of all.
Historical photographic processes do not have to survive because they are old.
They may survive because they can do something that contemporary image technologies increasingly struggle to do:
make us wait for the image.
Publication
Yi Xia, Jianrui Zhao, and Chihiro Sato, “Cyanotype as Slow Technology for Japanese Older Adults,” in C&C 2026 — Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, Association for Computing Machinery, 2026, pp. 1298–1302. DOI: 10.1145/3803784.3816818.
