When Natalie Cheung was a child, her parents hoped she’d become a piano prodigy. After 11 years of private lessons, however, the diligent student was delighted when they decided she could call it quits. By then attending Falls Church High School, she had been given her first camera. “I was working in the wrong art field,” the photographer recalls, and has never looked back.

Meanwhile, her collection of about a hundred cameras—from Hasselblads to Kodak Brownies—resides in permanent storage. Having gone through the experience of lugging around the cameras, inserting and then rolling up film, she says, “I was like kids on Instagram, always looking through the lens wondering what photo to take. I couldn’t live in the moment.”

Cheung now practices camera-less art. Based in the darkroom, the technique combines two chemicals that become light-sensitive when mixed. Called cyanotype, it is one of photography’s earliest forms, notably used for old architectural blueprints.

Her art refers back to the experimental roots of photography, especially the work of mid-19th-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, whose books of blue-toned cyanotypes illustrate algae that had been placed on photosensitive paper. Cheung’s watery abstractions depart from Atkins’ scientific intent. As the modern-day artist explains, “The fascination for me is to make photography relevant at a time when everybody has a camera on their phones and can take a picture, and you don’t need any technical skills.” Her driving question: “How do I put my traditional darkroom photography into a contemporary context?”

The answer: “voodoo magic.” That’s how Cheung describes the cyanotype process unleashed in the darkroom, where success is never assured. “Even if all the conditions are correct to create my work,” she reflects, “I can be met with disappointment many, many times. When there’s a good image, it’s very exciting!”
In the best cases, results appear fluid and other-worldly, at once celestial and terrestrial with heavenly blues splashing against indistinct earthier tones. Imagery might be seen as starry cosmologies or oceanic depths, where willowy organisms reign. In this ethereal universe, streams surge and subside—the darkest blues representing areas in which the mix evaporated first, the whitest whites where it lingered longest. “It’s up to the chaos in nature how each piece turns out,” Cheung remarks about these encounters between light and chemistry.

With traditional black-and-white, silver-gelatin photography, just a few seconds up to a minute of light exposure is needed. By contrast, Cheung’s images require ultraviolet light over many hours in the darkroom. In some cases, she overlaps exposures before stepping in to stop the process by washing the paper in clear water. Titles of her cyanotypes, such as Intermediaries: 40 & 18 Hours, indicate the evaporation time each one takes.

Cheung majored in photography at Corcoran College of Art & Design, before earning a master’s of fine arts in photography from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She now teaches digital-media design at GWU.

Cheung first discovered the cyanotype process in graduate school, where she learned all the things that could go wrong—if the intention were to make a traditional photograph. “I like all these mistakes. I’m going to keep making them,” the photographer pronounces. “In a way, my art exploits all those mistakes.”
Seated in her DC apartment, she retrieves an image from her student days. The early piece looks like an X-ray of a small pair of scissors between measuring tapes. It came about simply by placing the objects on photographic paper then exposing the paper to light. “It’s an example of a traditional darkroom photogram,” Cheung says of the image taken without benefit of camera, film or negative.

Three related black-and-white photograms hang on her apartment walls. Arranged in a row, they imply the movement of water, a glacier melting and comets bursting in space. “This is how I got to where I’m going,” Cheung says. “For me, trying to capture the uncapturable brings back the mystery at the beginnings of photography.”

In her apartment too, Cheung paints watercolors from leaves that she gathers on walks. Tipping the hat to Anna Atkins’ botanical cyanotypes, the artist compares these single-hued, ultramarine paintings to reimagined photographs. “I’m thinking about how one medium relates to another, and how one is influenced by another,” she observes.

Working in a DC darkroom, the artist recently started a new series called “Circadian.” It relates to circadian rhythms and “to the rhythms of life in general. How things come full circle,” Cheung notes. She uses a Japanese hake brush to paint the light-sensitive chemical in a circular motion on printmaking paper, which allows the mix to bleed in. She enjoys shaping the pattern with a brush—a measure of control that falls between the immediate results of watercolor and random chance of the blue cyanotype process. About this cyanotype variation, she effuses, “Blue forever! It never gets old, because it’s always different. Whether it is a failure or whether it is a success, the results are guaranteed always to be different.”

Natalie Cheung’s art is available through Morton Fine Art in Washington; mortonfineart.com. For more information, visit nataliecheung.com.