About MM Battelle

MM Battelle received her B.F.A. from the Massachusettes College of Art in Boston Massachusetts in the USA. Her photographic work during the past fifteen years reflects a diversity of technique and philosophical concerns. During the past several years Battelle has been involved in an extensive exploration of the cyanotype solar photogram, a mid 19th century photographic process.

Each individual piece is unique and one of a kind, printed in the bright unclouded Summer sun. The images extend from the simple and iconic to the abstract, and reinvent an older hands-on process while expressing a contemporary aesthetic. The cyanotype process, over 150 years old, is more familiarly known as blueprints.

The process of the cyanotype solar photogram was first used by the Victorian photographer and botanist Anna Atkins to illustrate her book: Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns. Battelle continues tp break new ground as she creates her camera-less Cyanotypes by placing her objects onto hand photosensitized paper which she then exposes to the sunlight. The process is photography, but the objects themselves - rather than a negative - become the light resist.

"Often I think that the brilliant Provincetown light in my pictures is the true subject of the work; But of course this can only be partially true since it is the shapes and forms themselves that give it purpose. Light and form become language while the finished image is a faithfully recorded and expression of both existence and impermanence. The deceptively simple elegance of the cyanotype solar photogram, ghost image burnt in by the sun, attaracts me again and again; Some kind of personal Zen statement about emptiness being form and form being emptiness. A practice and a solace. A rich blue Koan. "

MM Battelle , Provincetown Ma., 2005