Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes

At the dawn of the Victorian era, Anna Atkins undertook a radical experiment in her outdoor laboratory in Halstead, Kent, to document plant species using a completely new artistic medium. The unique cyanotype photograms of algae and ferns that Atkins created represent the first books with photographs. Her albums are the perfect synthesis of art and science, striking yet delicate. Although the printing technique, cyanotype, was discovered by her friend John Herschel, Atkins was the first to recognize its practical use for classifying species within botany and its fascinating artistic potential. In this printing process, the object is fixed onto sensitized paper and exposed to direct sunlight, resulting in the Prussian blue pigment that forms the distinctive background of these artworks. Atkins' album British Algae (1843–1853) and the book Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853), created with her friend Anne Dixon, are works of extraordinary rarity. They are published here in their entirety for the first time, demonstrating that Atkins mastered several disciplines: while the cyanotype allowed her to tackle the challenges of accurate representation, the delicate outlines of the specimens against the intense blue background imparted a timeless aesthetic appeal to the images. In this edition, cyanotypes from various sources have been carefully compiled to fully reproduce Atkins' progressive works, largely drawn from the collections of the New York Public Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Peter Walther contextualizes the over 550 cyanotypes in his introductory essays within the scientific and art historical framework to honor the groundbreaking contributions of a true pioneer.