Alicia Bergeron, an adjunct professor of photography at Colby-Sawyer, is a featured artist in an exhibition in Portsmouth exploring the book as a physical and conceptual vessel for memory, thought and creative life.   

Visual Diaries, the New Hampshire Art Association Photography Group's exhibition, will run Nov. 4-30, at the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery, 136 State St.; an opening reception will be held 5-8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 7.  

John Milton’s 1644 speech on the enduring vitality of books provided inspiration for the exhibition. “Books are not absolutely dead things," he wrote, “but do contain a potency of life in them ... they preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”  

For Visual Diaries, 17 artists each crafted a handmade book — an intimate, tactile form that merges photography, materiality and their personal vision.  

For her book, Botanical Blues, Bergeron created 15 wet cyanotypes (photographic blueprints; photography without a camera) between 2023 and 2025. She began with a traditional cyanotype as the base, then added reactive elements to add texture, layers and  mystery. 

“The process is all about experimentation and an openness to happy surprises,” she said. 

In October, Bergeron composed, printed and handbound the book using Coptic stitch, a technique used by the Copts in Ancient Egypt. 

In her book’s colophon, Bergeron credited Anna Atkins, an English botanist and possibly the first female photographer, with using the cyanotype process to document botanical species for the first published photo book — Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions — in 1843. 

Throughout the last year, artists participating in the exhibition met to support each other and critique the pieces. Their respective books function as visual journals, preserving traces of lived experience through photographic processes. 

“For me, it was the chance to dive deeper into my process, the wet cyanotype, and be part of something bigger, a photography community,” Bergeron said. “We were all exploring different processes, from digital to analog and alternative. It was incredibly inspiring.”