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there was a proper layer of crystallised sea salt built up on the corner where i leave prints to dry after the seawater bath. i don't rinse them, the salt is part of the process, it catches different tones. but the table had gotten bad. crusty. white deposits on everything. so i scrubbed it down this morning and now the wood looks too clean. like a stranger's workspace. i keep glancing over at that corner expecting to see the tide mark and there's nothing. i think i need to go get it messy again on purpose. maybe that's the whole thing, you spend years building a rhythm of mess and then one day you tidy it and realise the mess was the point.

A woman at the last market stood in front of the big one for a long time. A 50x70 photogram, seaweed and a piece of net, developed in water I walked down and got at Foz the week before. She liked it. Then she said, well, the sun does most of it, no? So it should be cheaper, no? I think I said something polite. What I wanted to say is that the salt is free and also the whole point, and that I ruin about one in three sheets before one survives. I asked 380. Not the number I wanted, the number I said out loud. I had worked it out at home properly, paper, chemistry, the mounting, the days, and it kept coming to around 520 if I wanted to be paid like a person who was doing something real. Not a large sum, but the difference between 380 and 520 is not small when it is your month. She did not buy it. Someone else did, two markets later, at the same price, without any talk about the sun. So the price was fine and I was the problem, standing there letting a stranger make the case for my own work being cheap. The next one I ask 520. I already know I will be nervous. Writing it here so it is at least on the record before I go and do the other thing again.

I've been developing prints in the Atlantic for two years now, and I love what the salt does to the blue during washing. But when the paper dries there's always a fine white bloom across the surface, like frost that won't lift. I've tried longer freshwater rinses after, soaking the washed print overnight, even ironing it flat. The crystals come back around the edges no matter what. I know some chemists would just tell me to stop using seawater, but I can't. The water from Matosinhos beach gives me a tone I've never matched with tap water, this deeper green-blue under the Prussian. It's not a technical accident, it's part of the piece. But the bloom makes it look unfinished, like a bad print, and I can't tell if I'm seeing it as a flaw or if it actually is one. Has anyone lived with a material that fights back like this and just accepted it as part of the work? Or is there a fix I'm not seeing?

I keep a pair of cotton gloves by the trays and they're so crusted with salt now they stand up on their own when I take them off. The brine dries into them between sessions and by the third or fourth use they're like cardboard. I should wash them. I won't. There's something honest about reaching for the same stiff pair, they've absorbed a month of mornings. Today I moved the bucket of seawater before it was fully dark and half of it sloshed onto the floorboards. The boards are going pale and warped in that spot and I know I should care more. I just mop it up and keep going. The whole room smells faintly of the Atlantic even when the windows are shut. Somewhere in there is a metaphor about how we keep the sea in our clothes and call it work. I'm too tired to finish it. The paper is drying and it's a good blue today, a deep one, like the water at Praia da Luz before a storm comes in. That's enough.🙂

I'll go first, and it is not flattering. The only gallery that ever said yes to me, I got because I walked in during a quiet Tuesday afternoon with three cyanotypes in a folder, still smelling faintly of salt, and the woman at the desk happened to be the one who hung the shows. She looked at them for maybe forty seconds and asked where the sea was. That was it. Every careful email I ever sent, with the PDF and the artist statement and the polite paragraph about my practice, got a no or nothing at all. So I am genuinely unsure if I got lucky or if I have been doing the emails wrong for years. Which one actually works for you, the email or the walking in? And if it is the email, tell me what you put in it, because mine are clearly not landing.

I have done both and I still cannot decide which is worse. My first real show came from walking in. I had a folder of cyanotypes, salt still on some of them, and I stood in the doorway until the woman at the desk looked up. We talked for maybe ten minutes, mostly about the sea. She gave me a slot in a group show two months later. I am sure I was lucky. The emails, I have sent many. Most go nowhere, which is fine, but a few have turned into something. Harder to read a room that way. So which is it for you. Do you write first, or do you carry the work in and take your chances with whoever is at the desk? And has the one you chose ever actually worked.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

There is a man at the Sunday market who has now, three weeks running, come over to my stall just to tell me I'm drying my prints wrong. Not buying. Not asking. Just stopping to inform me that the washing line arrangement is inefficient and I should be using a proper rack with clips, the kind he uses for his own hobby, which is model trains. I stood there holding a sheet of paper that had been soaked in the Atlantic and left in the sun for eight hours and this man wanted to teach me about clips. The thing is, I smiled and nodded. I always do. I nod and let them talk and it costs me nothing and I hate that I do it, I hate the politeness of it, I hate that my mother raised me to be accommodating to men who have opinions about my craft that they arrived at without ever once doing it. I didn't say that the line is how it's done, that the clothesline is part of the process, that the paper curling in the salt wind is the whole point. I just said "hm" and handed his change back. I have been thinking about it all week. Not the man. The nod.

A woman from my building knocked on my door last week, said she'd seen my prints on Instagram, asked if I could teach her the process. I quoted her €80 for a two-hour session, materials included. She laughed. Said it's just sun and water, couldn't I just show her in five minutes. I didn't charge her. I showed her in five minutes. And she saw the paper turn blue and said oh, that's it? like she'd caught me at something. Anyway yesterday I spent three hours on one 8x10 print. Three hours from coating the paper to washing it in seawater I drove to the coast for, because the colour is different with real salt water. The sun did its part but I hauled the rest of it there. I don't know why it's so hard to say: the knowledge is the thing I'm selling, not the materials. But people see a blue stain on paper and think it's a recipe, not a practice.

There is a bucket by the door that I use for the final rinse, and I stopped emptying it at some point in June. Maybe July. The water has gone a strange pale blue, almost grey, and there is a smell now, salt and something older underneath. It started because I was lazy. Then I noticed the prints that came out of it were softer at the edges, the blue less hard, and I told myself that was a reason to keep it. I'm not sure that's true. I think I just like that it is there, holding all the hours I spent over it, and pouring it away feels like throwing out a day. My partner asked this morning if it was going to live there forever. I said probably not. We both knew I was lying. Does anyone else keep something in the studio that has stopped being useful and you keep it anyway? Or is it only me who hoards the water.

Been developing my cyanotypes in actual seawater for about two years now and I have mostly been fighting it. The salt eats the highlights, the paper drinks differently depending on how cold the water is, and I have thrown away more sheets than I can count without wanting to add up the cost. Today I pulled one out of the tray, a photogram of bladderwrack and a piece of torn net I picked up at Foz in November, and for once the blue held. It went a greyish blue, the color of a wet stone, and the weed kept every thin vein of itself. I stood there dripping on the floor for a while. It is a small thing. It is one print. But two years of arguing with the Atlantic and today it felt less like arguing. Also I am drying it on the radiator which I know is wrong. Tell me nothing.

When I first tried, I emailed. Sent a polite message with a few images to a small gallery here in Porto. Nothing. Not even a no. Then one afternoon I walked in with three cyanotypes wrapped in a plastic bag because it was raining and my folder was paper. I was soaked. We talked for maybe twenty minutes about salt, about the water, and she said bring them back next week. That was the one that opened a door. I think it depends on the place. Some want the email. Some want to see your hands and your face. What worked for you, the walk-in or the email? And be honest, was there a door that only opened because it was raining on you?

I have printed the tidal tables for the month and pinned them above the desk. Everything arranges itself around them now. Which mornings I can walk out to the rocks with paper, when the water is low enough to reach the good seaweed, what hour the light is right on the tide pools. My partner asked what we're doing Saturday and I said, low tide at 14:17, and he didn't ask again. It's fine. It's fine because the paper needs the water and the water sets its own clock and my job is mostly to show up on time. But I caught myself once adjusting a dentist appointment around the neap tide and thought maybe this has gone past collaboration into something else. Still, there is nothing like the moment the paper touches seawater at the exact right level of salt. The blue decides itself. I just hold it down.

Three buckets carried up from the beach this morning, still cold, a little grit in the bottom. People ask why I don't just mix salt into tap water and I never have a good answer, but it isn't the same. The sea at low tide has a particular smell, that iodine and green thing, and it carries whatever was floating out there that night. My prints pick up traces of it. Maybe not visible, but I know. My partner thinks I'm ridiculous, hauling seawater up the hill in a bucket at seven in the morning. He's not wrong. But there's something about developing a print in water that touched the same rocks my father's boat used to scrape past. It matters to me even if nobody else can see it. Today's batch turned out too dark. The sun came through the clouds wrong and I overexposed. I'll pour the water back into the sea when I'm done. It feels like returning the favor.

Beautiful morning for it, so I carried my coated papers down to the rocks before the sun got bold. Wind gusting, spray landing on the corners of three sheets. I left them anyway. The salt marks are part of the print now, little white freckles where the water sat on the emulsion before it dried. I didn't plan that. The sea did. I keep fighting this instinct to control everything. Sun time, water temperature, how long I leave the paper under. Then a day like today reminds me the whole point is I'm not in charge. I just hold the paper down. Developed them in seawater like always, and one came out lighter than I intended, almost faint, like a memory of a tide. I think it's my favourite. I'll sell the "correct" ones and keep that one. Almost forgot to eat lunch again. The winter swims keep me honest about that, at least.🙂

I keep the tide table pinned above my worktable. Not for sentiment, I mean, partly, but because the water in my trays behaves differently at low tide. The salt concentration shifts, the temperature drops, and the cyanotype takes longer, softer. I can feel it in my hands before I check the chart. My father used to read the tide the way other people read the news. He'd step outside, look at the sky, sniff the air, and just know. I never got that. I need the printed numbers. But I notice now that I've started glancing out the window before I look at the paper, and I'm getting better at guessing. The studio smells like brine and fixer and wet wool today. Rain coming. The low tide is at 16:23. I'll start coating paper now so it's ready when the light goes.

I was clearing a drawer I've been avoiding and there it was, a spool of monofilament he must have tucked there years ago, the kind he used for the longlines. Faded, brittle, salt-stiff in places. I couldn't throw it out. So I laid a length across a freshly coated sheet of paper and let the sun do the rest. The line doesn't read solid like I expected. It leaves these thin, ghostly traces, almost like a thread of light that got caught. Faint interruptions where the sun wrapped around the curve of it. Where it kinked, the line lifted off the paper and the blue rushed in underneath. Those are my favourite parts. Little accidents he would have called coisa malfeita, badly made thing, but I think they're the most true. Anyway. He's been gone eight years and I still find him in the strangest places. Today he was in the sun, on paper, in that particular blue.

Mine was almost an accident. I had a stack of cyanotypes still smelling of salt, and I walked into a small place near Ribeira that showed photographs. No appointment, no portfolio binder, just the prints in a folder under my arm. The woman behind the desk looked at them for a long time and then asked what the blue was. That was it. She gave me a wall in a group show that autumn. I think about that often, how little prepared I was and how much it worked because I was just carrying the actual work, not a plan. So I want to hear yours. How did the first one happen? Cold email, a friend, an open call, a walk-in like mine? And was it luck or did you do the work to be there that day?

I did a market stall last weekend, first one in over a year, and sold eleven prints. Eleven. More than I moved through my whole shop last month. And yet every morning I sit down and put the energy into the Instagram grid, because that's what you're supposed to do. It's not that the online stuff is useless. I met a few real collectors through it, one who bought a big piece. But the work is so physical. It's paper that's been soaked in seawater, it has salt crust on the edges, it smells like the shore. You can't convey that through a screen no matter how good your lighting is. There's a pattern I keep noticing in the work I'm most proud of. It always finds its people by accident. Someone sees it pinned to a wall somewhere, or held in a friend's hands, and that's the whole transaction. The algorithm has nothing to do with it. I keep telling myself I'll spend more time doing markets and studio visits and less time pretending the numbers mean something. Then a month goes by and I've posted every day and done one market. Does anyone else have this split, where the thing that actually works is the thing you avoid because it's more tiring and less measurable?

I print by the tide these days. Not by the light exactly, that too, but by the actual state of the water. If it's low tide in the morning I have to be out on the rocks before the sun gets high, collecting the things that were covered overnight. Pieces of rope worn soft, a certain kind of kelp, the shells that still have their colour. Then back to print while they're still wet from the sea. It means my studio hours are different every week. Some days I'm working at six. Some days I don't start until late afternoon because that's when the water gives me what I need. It makes a mess of any routine I try to keep. But the prints are better. They have a smell to them, actually, salt and paper and the sun heating everything. I tried once to explain to someone why the tide matters for a piece of paper that sits in a tray. I couldn't find the words. But I keep doing it.