Commissions: Places Held
Commissions: Places Held
Places Held are commissioned cyanotypes made in response to places you have come to know deeply - a wild corner of a childhood garden, an abandoned car park of wild poppies, a tree pit, a landscape you help tend.
The cyanotype will be toned with a botanical connected to the landscape, or one we choose together for its plant lore - two of my favourites include hawthorn, associated with spring and boundaries, and rosemary, associated with remembrance.
Together, we’ll work with your photograph and the story of the place it comes from. We can stay true to the original image composition, or I can crop, reframe or draw out a fragment.
Places Held is an extension of my practice and place-based work, exploring how we encounter and attend to landscapes.
If you’d like to talk through your place or photograph before commissioning a piece, just get in touch.
The process
We begin with a conversation about your place, your images and what you want the work to hold. You can send me a single photograph or a selection, and we’ll decide together which image to work from and how you’d like me to approach it - or you can leave the interpretation to me.
In my studio, I create a photographic negative from your image, coat paper with light-sensitive chemicals, and expose the print using UV light. I then tone the cyanotype in a bath of the botanical we selected together, altering the print’s chemistry to shift the traditional blue into quiet, earthy tones.
I can work from digital photographs, scanned photographs, photographic film or negatives, including 35mm, medium format and 4 × 5-inch film. Original photographs will be handled with the greatest care.
Once we have decided on your image and botanical together, the making process takes two to three weeks. The finished work will be sent by recorded delivery or can be collected from my studio in Haggerston, London.
The work
One original toned cyanotype, up to 10 × 8 inches, made on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag paper
Unframed (I can recommend suitable framers or help you arrange framing)
Presented in a black box tray for safe handling and storage
Certificate of Authenticity
Cyanotype care instructions
My practice
I began working with cyanotypes in 2021 after receiving an a-n bursary to research alternative photographic processes alongside botanical processes. This research led to a series of works, including Wildfire on Walthamstow Marshes.
I am a liveaboard boater, moving from place to place, and often moor and walk on Walthamstow Marshes, a wetland and Site of Special Scientific Interest in North East London. In April 2025, I witnessed a significant wildfire there. In the foreground is the aftermath of the burnt reeds; in between, not visible, is the River Lea. This cyanotype, made on second-hand wallpaper liner, is toned with reeds harvested further up the Lea. It hangs on a piece of found wood, fly-tipped by another boater moored nearby.
“Thank you, Harri, for the most beautiful cyanotype. Your commissions gave me a unique opportunity to mark a return to a place I hadn’t been back to for 20 years. It gave me space to pause and reflect on a complex and sometimes invisible, shape-shifting, unquantifiable loss. Thank you.”
For me, making these works is a way of witnessing and archiving the places we live alongside. Do get in touch if you would like to discuss a commission.