Anna Atkins
Anna Atkins (1799 – 1871). English.
How odd is it that a Victorian botanist, who owned a camera yet left no evidence of every having used it, would become famous as the inventor of the photobook and as, quite possibly, the first female photographer?
Anna Atkins is, indeed, a curious figure. There is something both delightful and inspiring about the ways in which her book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843,) subverts almost anyone’s expectations of what the first book of photographs might look like.
First of all, the images are blue. Blue and white, more precisely.
Secondly, each image presents a rather detail-less, ghostly shape of a different algae.
Thirdly, there’s Anna’s delicate hand-written captions revealing the Latin name of each species.
Photographer unknown. Anna Atkins. 1861
Looking through her images feels like stumbling upon evidence of someone’s private obsession hidden in a dresser drawer. The photographs make us wonder as much about the person as we do about the objects depicted, and while the author’s intent seems to be to convey botanical information, nothing could feel less scientific and more mysterious than this little book.
Anna Atkins. British Algae. 1843.
Which is perfect, because over the next 175 years the photobook would emerge as the deepest and most complex expression of photography’s ability to generate meaning. How gratifying that the progenitor of such an important art form wasn’t some catalog of military leaders or documentation of colonial power (plenty of those were to come).
Atkins’ images are blue because she was friends with Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype, which is a photographic paper that uses ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide instead of silver. We don’t know precisely why Atkins chose Sir Herschel’s cyanotype, but it might have been because the paper was inexpensive and relatively simple to use. This same technique would be used for decades to make architectural blueprints, and today survives as a popular alternative photographic process.
Anna Atkins. British Algae. 1843.
The algae she depicts in her photos are shadowy and without detail because Atkins used a camera-less technique invented by another family friend, William Henry Fox Talbot, an early pioneer of photography.
He called the process “photogenic drawing,” but today it’s more commonly referred to as a photogram.
Anna Atkins. British Algae. 1843.
Atkins made her photograms by laying the dried algae directly onto the cyanotype paper and then exposing it to light. Where light struck the paper, it turned blue when developed. Where the algae blocked the light, the paper remained white, or a lighter shade of blue.
Atkins self-published the first installment of her book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843 in a very limited edition. Between then and 1853 she produced two more installments under the same title. Today only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, and not all of them are complete. So hers is not just the first photobook, it’s also one of the rarest and most prized photobooks in the world.