This week, the Photo Crusades goes globetrotting with Alabama-born Cyanotype extraordinaire Robert Schaefer. Robert began his schooling in his home state, earning a BA of Architecture with a minor in Photography from Auburn University, but promptly shipped himself to Europe where he continued his education in Germany at the Technical University of Munich.
During his years in Europe, Robert’s work was featured in various galleries in Germany, France, and Austria. Once he returned to the United States and settled in New York City, Robert developed his skills even further, scanning images and enlarging them for his exhibitions in galleries, magazines, and private collections.
After visiting Alabama to celebrate 25 years of his work at the Huntsville Museum of Art, Robert returned to New York and began teaching at New York University and Penumbra Foundation, which conducts workshops in 19th Century photographic processes. The Goethe Institute in India sponsored two exhibitions of his cyanotypes in both Chandigarh and Delhi. Current times find Robert continuing to express his art through the classic process of the cyanotype in his new city, New Orleans, where he moved in 2015. Most recently he was one of the instructors for World Cyanotype Day at the New Orleans Healing Center and will instruct a Cyanotype Workshop for the New Orleans Museum of Art on November 3rd.
Let’s see how Robert’s decades of evolution translate into this week’s theme of the Photo Crusades