Volume III of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

Narrator: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Volume III. By Anna Atkins. Circa 1853. Book of cyanotypes. 11 inches high by 1 foot 4 inches wide, when displayed open.

This is a bound copy of a book, with thick pages. The book will be opened at different pages during the course of the exhibition to allow different images to be displayed.

At each opening, the page on the left is white and blank. The page on the right is a vivid deep-blue color. Silhouetted against the blue, in a much paler whitish blue, is the outline of a sample of seaweed or algae. Each is labelled with its Latin name below. The algae are varied in appearance, some with branching, frondlike structures, others with tubular shapes or long, whiplike strands, and others again with flat, smooth, bladelike forms.

Interpretive commentary follows.

Anna Deavere Smith: Some objects are treasured for their beauty or rarity; some for what they reveal about history, technology, or science; and some are appreciated for all those reasons.

Take a close look at the image in front of you. Notice the delicate branching forms, some resembling fine filigree. This book is called Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, and it’s the first published book in history to be illustrated with photographs. But these pictures were not taken with a camera.

In the early 1800s, a time when men dominated the fields of both art and science, Anna Atkins was an amateur botanist and a skilled illustrator of natural specimens. In the 1840s, Atkins began experimenting with a new image-making process invented by her friend, the chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. Known as cyanotype, it involved the use of light-sensitive paper. As Atkins notes in her introduction: 

Actor: “The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algae [...] has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves.”

Anna Deavere Smith: For each illustration, Atkins first coated a sheet of paper with a photosensitive solution. She then laid the plant specimen on top and covered it with a pane of glass before leaving it out in the sun. Sunlight turned the exposed areas a beautiful blue that deepened when the print was washed and dried. 

Atkins produced a small run of books over the course of a decade, repeating the process for each page of every copy of her book. Today, just 15 mostly complete copies are known to remain, each illustration a unique work of art—and science.