Photographer and artist Rinne Allen’s Light Drawings were introduced at Alabama Chanin during the summer of 2015. At that time, the Alabama Chanin Collection featured Indigo textiles, and the blue cyanotypes resonated perfectly with our designs.

In addition to her blue light drawings, Rinne also creates sepia-colored works of art, which are presented alongside our Rinne’s Dress Collection.

Developed in the 19th century, light drawings are created by exposing light sensitive paper to the sun, leaving behind only a shadow of the specimen. The process used to create the sepia prints is called Van Dyke Brown and requires an extra step in the darkroom—making them rarer than well-known blue cyanotypes.

For the process, Rinne combines elements from her garden with alternative photo processing methods she learned in some of her early college photography classes. She and her mother gather clippings from the garden and place them on specially treated light sensitive photo paper and lay them in the sun. After a certain amount of exposure to sunlight, a cyanotype emerges.

Find the one-of-a-kind Light Drawings online here.