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I make my cyanotypes with seawater instead of tap, which I know sounds romantic and is mostly just practical, the sea is a two minute walk and the tap water here is very hard anyway. But the tray of it has been on the balcony since Tuesday and I have not gone near it. The thing about seawater is it does not stay the same. Something in it keeps working on the print after you think you have finished. Two days in and the blues start to go slightly green at the edges, then a sort of grey comes up from underneath. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes the whole thing turns to dishwater and there is nothing to do but start again with a fresh sheet. So now I am standing in the kitchen looking at the balcony door, knowing there is a print in there that is either the best thing I have made this year or a dead loss, and either way it is already too late to change it. I have been finding small reasons not to go out. I watered the plants twice. I will look tomorrow. I always say tomorrow.

I kept a jar of seawater on the shelf after a day of printing instead of pouring it back. Forgot about it for two weeks. When I finally used it the blues came out softer, almost dusty, like the color had gone to sleep. Same paper, same sun, same time under the glass. I've been chasing that exact tone ever since and the fresh seawater won't give it to me. Now I'm the person with a shelf of aging saltwater jars, labeling them by date like wine. My partner says it's a kitchen full of sea and I think he's right but I'm not stopping. There's a whole chemistry happening in there I never learned properly. Bacteria, evaporation, the iron settling. I like not fully knowing, honestly. Some things should keep a little mystery.

There's a bucket of seawater on my studio floor that's been there since Tuesday. I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not doing it, and now it's become this small fixed point I walk around, like a pet I've forgotten to feed. Probably has something living in it by now. I don't even remember what I was going to use it for. Some experiments I had in mind about development time in colder water, and then the day got away from me like they do. It's not the first time. There's a shelf of dried prints I've never mounted because I liked them better loose, and they're starting to curl. I think half of making work is just this. Holding things long enough to decide they matter, and letting the rest quietly go bad in a bucket.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

There's a plastic bucket under the sink in the studio, one of those cheap ones from the hardware shop on Rua da Alegria, and it's been full of seawater since February. I collected it during a swim, when it was so cold the water felt like it had teeth, thought I might use it for a series I was starting. Never started it. Now it's just there. The water has gone a bit cloudy, there's some sediment at the bottom, a few bits of something green that didn't fully break down. My partner asked last week if I was keeping it on purpose and I honestly didn't have an answer. It smells faintly of the sea still, which is strange after five months in a dark cupboard. I know I should pour it out. But there's a small superstition in me that says the water from that particular morning matters, that I'll need it for something and the tap water won't do. Meanwhile there's no room under the sink for the new bucket. Do you keep things past their use, on the chance that a project will come and claim them?

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.

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?

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.

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 collected a few litres of seawater two weeks ago during the storm, when the sea was throwing everything at the rocks. I strain it before developing prints in it because there is always sand, sometimes a bit of weed, once a small crab leg. Kept it in glass jars on the bench. Today I used the last of it and I already miss that particular batch. Each one is different. The temperature, the salt, whatever the sea was carrying that day. It changes the blue, barely, but it changes. Now I need to wait for the next storm to get more, and I resent that the water in the tap won't do. It is a strange way to work. I know that. But the paper remembers where the water came from even if my eye can barely tell.

Small one. I've been rinsing the cyanotypes in tap water for two years, out of habit and a bit of fear, and this week I finally just carried a tray down to the rocks at Foz and let the Atlantic finish them. I expected to lose the lot. Instead the blues came out softer, with a grain in the paper I've been trying to fake with brushes. One of them, a photogram of a piece of net I picked up in Matosinhos, has a shadow in the corner from where a wave came over the tray edge. I would have thrown that away before. My father would have laughed at me standing in the water with paper. Not unkindly. Anyway, I'm not going back to tap water for the final wash.

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 finally worked up the courage to ask a gallery in Lisbon to take some of my cyanotypes. Twelve pieces, seaweed and net photograms, all of them made with seawater from the beach near my flat. She offered me 180 each. I said yes because I was tired and because she said it in a way that made 180 sound like a favour. They went up in her window at 520. Three sold before Christmas. I know about the standard split, I know she has rent to pay and she has to make it worth her while. I am not naive about that. What I did not expect is how quiet it made me feel, walking past that window, doing the arithmetic in my head every time. My paper costs about 9 euros a sheet and I ruin maybe one in four. The seawater I carry up from the shore in a bucket like an idiot. I don't say any of that to her because it sounds like I want pity rather than a fair price. I wrote a new number down in my notebook and I have not sent it yet. 340. Which still feels like too much and also like not enough, and I cannot tell which of those is the honest one. What I keep circling is that she never asked what I wanted for them. She just told me a number, and I took it, the way I always do. That part is mine.

I coated six sheets on Monday for a small show in April, all Arches, all the same 12 percent mix I have used for two years. Hung them on the line to dry and felt nothing. The problem is not the technique. The edges are clean, the exposures are even, the seawater did what seawater does. That is exactly the trouble. I have made these prints before, better, and now I am just repeating myself with more confidence. What I think happened is I stopped being surprised by my own materials. I know what the seaweed will do. I know the net will go soft at the edges. So I place it, I wait, I rinse, I get what I expected. There is no conversation anymore, only instructions. I have one sheet left from that batch. Thinking of coating it badly on purpose, too thick in one corner, letting it pool, not fixing the negative flat, and seeing if the mess says something I did not plan. Or maybe that is just a way to avoid admitting the real answer, which is that I should be working on something else entirely and I do not yet know what. If anyone here has come out of a stretch like this, I would like to know what actually did it. Not the advice version. The thing you did.

Every cyanotype I make gets developed in sun and seawater, and that is usually beautiful. This week I did a set in the dark, under my own hands, timing the exposure second by second instead of letting the sky decide. I had been avoiding it because I thought losing the sun would flatten everything. It did the opposite. Four prints of a scallop net, all of them finally the blue I keep seeing in my head and never quite got on paper, that deep cold blue the sea goes in January when nobody is in it. I have been printing for years and I still cannot explain why the same formula, the same paper, gives me a different blue depending on the day. But now I know I can hold the door shut myself when I need to. The sun is back tomorrow. I will go back to the beach with the paper and let it do what it wants. It just feels good to know I am not only waiting for weather anymore.

Yesterday a man watched me hang a cyanotype to dry at the market stall and asked if I'd considered laminating them "so they'd last longer." Laminating. The Prussian blue, the paper that's been soaked in the same Atlantic water my father worked in, and he wants me to run it through a plastic machine like a restaurant menu. I told him the blue fades a little over the years and that's the point. He looked at me like I'd said I pee on them for tone. Which, to be fair, is closer to what I do, since it's seawater and sun doing half the work. I've been thinking about permanence a lot lately. We fought the sea for so long to hold things still. Some of us held the camera. Some of us just let the light decide what stays and what goes. I know which one feels more honest to me now.

When I first showed the cyanotypes, the woman at the desk looked at them a long time and then asked if they were finished. The white edges, the brush marks, the slight bleed where the seawater got past the tape. She meant it kindly, I think, but it stayed with me for weeks. I said yes. They are exactly as finished as I want them. But I drove home wondering whether I should have said something better. So, what is the strangest or most useful thing a gallery has said about how you make the work? Not the price talk, the process talk. Did it change anything, or did you keep going as you were?

Someone asked me at the Feira da Vandoma last month what a cyanotype costs, and I heard myself say "it depends on the paper," which is true and also a way of not answering. Here is the real thing. A 30x40 print on Arches, seawater-developed, sun for however long it takes that day, I ask 120. It could be three hours of work or it could be four days of waiting for the right light and starting over. I don't count. If I counted I would have to charge something nobody in that market is going to pay, and I am not sure I would want to charge it either. So the price is a kind of average of the good days and the ruined ones. It works out. It is also the reason I have never said a number out loud here, and why I felt a small shame writing 120 just now. What I keep circling is this. The friends who ask me to make them something, "just a small one for the hallway," I say yes and then it is not small and it is not free and I have spent a fortnight on it, and I cannot find the door out of that conversation. Not asking anyone to solve it. I think I just wanted to write the number down somewhere.

Left four cyanotypes face-up on the boardwalk by Matosinhos to dry in the sun, went off for a coffee and got talking, came back and the tide had already taken two of them. Not ruined, just gone, carried out somewhere into the Atlantic. The other two were soaked through with saltwater which honestly might have done them good. Everybody says oh no, your work. But I sat there a minute and thought, that's the process. I spend all year trying to get seawater onto paper and the sea just decides when it's ready. My grandmother used to say the sea takes what it wants, and she never meant it as a complaint. The ironic thing is the two it took were the best of the batch. Of course they were.

Sold two cyanotypes this month. Each one needed a full day of sun, and a day of sun in Porto in January is a small miracle. I waited eleven days between them just for the light to show up. Fourteen hours of actual exposure time across both, plus the coating, the washing in seawater, the drying, the flat files. €160 for the pair. I worked it out at the kitchen table and it came to about €11 an hour, and that's before the paper and the chemistry. The strange part is I'm not even angry. I set those prices. I've had the same number in my head for three years and not once questioned it. The print is a thing I love making more than anything, so I kept pricing it like a hobby that occasionally pays rent. I'm not raising it to €400 tomorrow. I think I'm going to test €85 per print and see who flinches. Even that feels like lying, which tells me exactly how far I am from a fair number.