Navigating Boundaries in the Photography of Anna Atkins
It’s impossible to just walk past an Anna Atkins cyanotype. Her extraordinary works of early photography are too striking to ignore: the bright Prussian blue background contrasted by the ghostly white tendrils of an algae, her spindly, precise handwriting spelling out the Latin name. In the early days of photography, Atkins used the new blueprinting technology to beautifully capture the natural world.
The striking nature of her cyanotypes is likely why we know Atkins’s name today. Her self-published “British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,” started in 1843, was the first book illustrated with photography, as well as the first scientific manual that made use of the medium.
But over the next century, her name was uncoupled from her cyanotypes. When they were initially acquired by various institutions, Atkins was often listed as the author and donor, but she signed her images with a simple “AA.” Over time her name was erased, and her work credited to “Anonymous Amateur.” Because the prints weren’t associated with her name for decades, there wasn’t an easy bibliographic way of tracing her life and publications. The visual art of her scientific documentation kept her work in museum collections even without attribution.
“She was obviously ambitious, she was obviously very talented,” says Joshua Chuang in an interview with Lady Science. Chuang is the senior curator of photography at the New York Public Library (NYPL) who curated the library’s recent Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins exhibit of Atkins’s work. “It’s just the way history’s written, right? That history was mainly written by men. Her role was obscured, not necessarily on purpose, but after she died, she was pretty much forgotten about.”
Atkins’s life recounts a tale of boundary navigation among acceptability and availability for women in science, anonymous publication, and, most prominently, the increasingly fluid boundary between scientific discovery and artistic creation.
Cover to Anna Atkins’s British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Eminent botanists and scientific inventors received and consulted her work in the 1800s, but Anna Atkins didn’t get the history-making credit she deserves until research reconnected her name and personhood to her photographs in the 1970s.
“Atkins’ production was the first sustained effort to apply photography to the complex task of making exactly repeatable images for scientific study and learning,” wrote Larry Schaaf in his article The First Photographically Printed and Illustrated Book, which first identified Atkins as a pioneering photographer in 1979. “It is a landmark in book publishing and illustration.”
The 1800s were a time of collecting and categorizing the natural world. This was the era of Darwin, of a branching tree of life. The British Museum was expanding. Botany was considered a feminized science that women were societally allowed to take part in, especially botanical art and illustration. However, by the 1830s, men were trying to draw gendered gatekeeping boundaries between women practicing botany (informed but not professional) and men practicing botany (the true experts and scientists). Men like botany teacher John Lindley wanted to “modernize” the science by distancing it from women: he bemoaned that botany had become “an amusement for ladies rather than an occupation for the serious thoughts of man.”
In this milieu, Atkins had the privilege of both class and a father who encouraged her interest in science. Born in 1799 and raised by her father John George Children, the keeper of the newly created zoological department at the British Museum, Atkins was part of his world of scientific education and exploration. She worked with him to illustrate his translated version of a book on shells and supplied plant specimens to Kew Gardens. Their family social circle encompassed photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and Sir John Herschel, who invented the process of cyanotyping.
Although Atkins had access to prominent men in science through her father, she still had to navigate the Victorian era gendered boundaries. Her father handled most of her correspondences, another reason why her work remained unattributed for so long.
Through the family social circle, she learned about photography as it was being developed. Atkins was at the Royal Society talk Talbot delivered in 1839 about his early photography experiments. She also had the financial access to the tools of the trade.
It didn’t take her long to put the new discoveries she witnessed to use. Less than a year after John Herschel invented the cyanotype in 1842, Atkins created and started self-publishing her groundbreaking book “British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.”
Cyanotype of Cystoseira fibrosa from Anna Atkins’s British Algae. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Before Atkins, people had tried to capture plants through illustration or even gluing the original specimen into books. Herbarium sheets, created by pasting dried plants to paper, were also popular. Using the new cyanotype process, Atkins exposed the reactive paper to sunlight, creating blue images of algae native to the British coast and ponds. She was interested in capturing her extensive algae collection, which included more than 1,500 specimens by the time she donated it to the British Museum in 1865.
‘‘The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute … has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Hershel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype,” she wrote in the introduction to the book. “I have much pleasure in offering [it] to my botanical friends.”
This was only a few months before “The Pencil of Nature,” Talbot’s book of photography, was published. Talbot was interested in commercially promoting photography. Instead of using cyanotypes, which can only expose shades of blue, he set up a printing facility to mass produce his book using thousands of plates. Before Schaaf’s research acknowledged Atkins for her work, Talbot’s book was recognized as the first photographic book and called “the Gutenberg Bible of photographic printing.” The book itself wasn’t a commercial success, but Talbot’s inventions and work were always credited, keeping his name in the photography canon over the years.
Atkins took the more DIY route and published her own work. With “British Algae,” she created each page by hand, likely with the help of her staff, then nimbly mailed her pages of cyanotype prints to readers and her “botanical friends” with instructions for binding. Each print involved placing the seaweed specimens on the sensitized paper, exposing them individually to sunlight, rinsing then drying the paper.
Along with the “British Algae” prints, Atkins sent instructions for how to put them together. This was a common practice at the time—bookstores sold pages stitched together to be bound at home, and wealthier Britons would have their books personally bound for their libraries.
What’s uncommon is that for the next decade, Atkins continued to mail new and updated prints, expanding the book to three volumes. She continued to self-publish on a regular schedule, sending out 12 installments over the next 10 years—a total of at least 6,000 prints created by hand.
Today, there are 17 known copies of “British Algae,” and each one is slightly different depending on how the recipients followed (or ignored) her assembly instructions.
Cyanotype of Odonthalia dentata from Anna Atkins’s British Algae. New York Public Library Digital Collections.
“If she got a better specimen or felt that she could do a plate better, she would send a new version and ask [the recipient] to replace the previous one,” says Dr. Katy Barrett in an interview with Lady Science.
Barrett is the Curator of Art Collections at the Science Museum in London and co-curated last year’s The Art of Innovation exhibit, which included Atkins’s cyanotypes.
“There are a lot of things that are unusual about Atkins,” she says, “including that she did this project over a period and changed how she wanted people to organize and bind them, which is why you get the variations.”
Atkins sent Herschel and Talbot copies of her book, and they are now part of the New York Public Library and the Science Museum Group collections, respectively.
The NYPL’s recent Blue Prints exhibit was the first solo show of her work, nearly 200 years after “British Algae” was published. Because Hershel never bound his Volume I prints, the library was able to display case after case of her work as well as a recently acquired Volume III collection. One of goals of the exhibit was to re-insert Atkins into the history of photography and to associate her images with her name, especially for other institutions that may have her works but aren’t aware of their significance.
“She’s decidedly not just a historical figure in the history of science but also the history of art and photography,” Chuang says.
Centuries after Atkins created them, the photographs are still beautiful art and precise botanical science. She worked at a time when the line we now draw between science and art was much less firm, and her prints reflect the truth in that collapsed boundary. Atkins navigated the boundaries both of “acceptable” science for women and anonymity, and through her work also navigated and further blurred the boundaries between art, photography, and science.
Little of Atkins’s own writing remains, so it’s impossible to know exactly how she thought of herself. But the arc of her work may hold some clues. After 10 years of meticulously working on the algae project, she moved on to new natural subjects to photograph: flowering plants and ferns. In that evolution, she started using larger formats and less formal nomenclature. She made fewer copies of each work.
“You can see, in my eyes at least, that she becomes more of an artist as she goes on,” Chuang says.
Image credit: Cyanotype of Cystoseira ericoides from Anna Atkins’s British Algae. New York Public Library Digital Collections]
