Detail of
Rhodomenia sobolifera from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, ca.
1843–53
In an era when
the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna
Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes,
created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in
startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts
among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather
than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate”
themselves.
In the
preface to his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, English inventor Henry Fox
Talbot described his “little work” as the “first attempt to publish a series of
plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing.”
Talbot had grandiose ambitions for the future of photography — a medium he had
played a role in creating — but this experimentation was already well under
way. He was not, as he claimed, the first person to publish a book of
photographic prints. That distinction belongs to an amateur botanist named Anna
Atkins.
Starting in
the early 1840s, Atkins created hundreds of cyanotypes, a photographic process
in which paper is treated with a chemical solution before being exposed to
sunlight. When objects are left on the treated paper — British ocean plants, in
Atkins’ case — over time they produce a white silhouette against an inky blue
ground. Bound together, Atkins’ images served as an illustrated supplement to
the phycologist William Henry Harvey’s Manual of British Algae (1841). This
arrangement was typical at the time, when printing text and images in a single
book would have been prohibitively expensive. Indeed, in this and many other
ways, Atkins’ work assumed the standard conventions of botanical illustration,
and were it not for her use of the novel medium, British Algae would have most
likely been forgotten to history.
Various
algal forms from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, ca. 1843–53
As it is,
Atkins has become a posthumous celebrity, raised from obscurity in the 1980s by
art historian Larry Schaaf as quite possibly the world’s first woman
photographer. Today, her cyanotypes — of ferns as well as algae — are housed in
the collections of some of the finest museums in the world and have come to be
understood primarily as objets d’art, prized less for their scientific
contributions than their artistic merit. Yet beyond their aesthetic
innovations, these images convey something important about the understanding of
the natural world at a time of scientific upheaval, even if this was not their
creator’s explicit intent.
By her own
admission, Anna Atkins (née Children) turned to the medium of cyanotypes
because she felt they could best capture the minute details of the algal
specimens that were the subject of her first photographic book. But by the time
Atkins published British Algae, she had already demonstrated her affinity for botanical
drawing. After her mother died in her infancy, Atkins was raised by her father,
a chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist who gave her a scientific education that
would have been uncommon for a woman at that time. Under his guidance, she took
up drawing at a young age and illustrated a companion to his translation of
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells in 1823. Her prior achievements with
hand-drawing naturally lead one to wonder why she would choose to turn to
cyanotypes, a more costly and in many ways less practical medium, and there are
potential insights to be found in the long evolution of scientific illustration
as a genre.
Atkins’
illustrational and photographic work situated her within an artistic tradition
that stretches back nearly two millennia, with conventions that have evolved
over time to suit its users’ needs. Among the earliest iterations of botanical
illustration were manuals or “herbals” that helped medical practitioners
identify plants with therapeutic properties. In the 1600s, naturalists began
documenting the exotic flora they encountered during exploratory trips to the
Americas, Africa, and Asia, producing lavishly illustrated books for the
homebound European scholar. But the so-called Golden Age of botanical
illustration came later, coinciding with the height of the European
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. During this period, one of the primary
aims of botanical illustrators was to contribute to the total understanding of
the natural universe, a goal that was understood to be not just theoretically
possible but actually achievable.
In the
field of botany, one of the most prolific contributors to the Enlightenment
project was Carl Linnaeus, who developed a standardized system for identifying
and naming all manner of flora and fauna. His popularization of binomial
nomenclature provided a globally uniform set of species names, while his
taxonomy offered an orderly system whereby plants could be divided into genera
based almost solely on the structure and number of their reproductive organs,
discounting most other features. Linnaeus was handsomely rewarded for his
contributions to the field. He was known in his time as the “Prince of
Botanists” and was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1758, but this popularity
can largely be attributed to the fact that his work reaffirmed the already
popular notion that the universe was an orderly system just waiting to reveal
its secrets to the keen minds capable of deciphering them.
By the time
Atkins was working a century later, this orderly vision of the world had begun
to unravel. A confluence of scientific discoveries — from more accurate
theories about the age of the earth to the discovery of previously unknown
organisms in the fossil record — had led many naturalists, even those who had
previously believed in the fixity of species, to hypothesize that the plants
and animals that lived in their time had not existed since the world’s
beginning but had instead evolved from entirely different species through
interactions with their environment.
Enteromorpha
intestinalis (left) and Ulva bullosa (right) from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of
British Algae, ca. 1843–53
Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck put forward his theory on the “transmutation of species” as early as
1802. Thirty years later, Goethe proposed that “[t]he plant forms which
surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked
into the given form, [rather,] they have been given . . . a felicitous mobility
and plasticity allowing them to grow and adapt themselves to many different
conditions in many different places.” These whispers eventually culminated in
Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the product of
more than two decades of agonizing research.
It is
difficult to say just how much Atkins may have been influenced by these ideas.
She was surely kept apprised of important discoveries by her father, who played
an active role in multiple scientific societies until his death in 1852, but
there is no written evidence to suggest that she was particularly invested in
the evolutionary debates of the era. Even so, scientific data and how it is
presented has always played a part in forming, challenging, or reinforcing its
viewers’ understanding of the world, and for all their apparent adherence to
tradition, Atkins’ cyanotypes offered a starkly different vision of nature than
the one that predominated in her time.
The visual
conventions of most nineteenth-century botanical illustration had helped uphold
the idea that species were discrete, innate, and unchanging. Specimens were
typically displayed alone on a white ground, devoid of environmental context.
Although fidelity was paramount, artists would omit distracting imperfections
from their drawings, and the final image was often the composite of multiple
specimens, implying the existence of a platonic ideal. Sometimes the central
subject was surrounded by additional views of the plant in various life stages,
or in cross-section, if significant features were obscured in the primary
drawing. These conventions suited the purposes of identifying and codifying
plant species, but they also reflect a scientific approach that, to quote the
ethnobiologist Scott Atran, “emerged by decontextualizing nature, by curiously
tearing out water lilies from water so that they could be dried, measured,
printed, and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and
most of the senses.”
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Various
fern forms from Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853
Upon
initial examination, a similar charge could be made against Atkins, whose
practice necessitated tearing her subjects from their environs and likewise
presented them alone on the page, though in her case this was partly a
limitation of her chosen medium. Indeed, it was not only the natural context
that was concealed by the cyanotype process, the specimen's surface and texture
too was lost to these startling, blue-and-white silhouettes.
Despite
these limitations, one can’t help but see in Atkins’ images of algae and ferns
the ghostly presence of their lost vegetal source, for the cyanotype
necessarily preserves the vagaries of an individual specimen. Here the torn
leaves and tangled roots, invariably captured by the photographic process, act
as an affirmation of the materiality of their subject and help retain something
of the amateur engagement with nature in which the plant is met on its own
terms, never fully revealing itself to its human observer. Though not literally
snapshots, her images capture their subjects at a particular moment in time,
granting them an exceptional degree of authenticity when compared to
traditional botanical illustration, whose practitioners were still largely
involved in upholding a static and increasingly outdated vision of the world.
By 1856, around the peak of Atkins’ career, Darwin would disparage his peers’
ongoing efforts to divide the earth’s biota into a set of fixed species as
“trying to define the indefinable.”
The
evolutionist’s concerns dovetailed with a contemporaneous, albeit waning,
strand of scientific inquiry, one that pushed back against the excesses of an
increasingly strict positivism and saw the sensuous engagement with nature as a
precondition for genuine understanding. This romantic approach to life science,
what Goethe referred to as “tender empiricism”, prioritized the study of
processes over organisms in isolation, and understood life to be mutually
constituted, constantly changing form through its environmental interactions.
As Amanda Jo Goldstein has argued, many of the naturalists and writers who
subscribed to this school of thought, among them Goethe, Blake, Shelley, and
Herder, put a premium on firsthand engagements with nature and aimed to capture
their experiences in poetic modes that reflected their own capacity to affect
and be affected by their objects of study.
Sargassum
plumosum (left) and Porphyra laciniata (right) from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of
British Algae, ca. 1843–53
Asperococcus
pusillus (left) and Myriotrichia claviformis (right) from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, ca. 1843–53
We can see
a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist
choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a
position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal
collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but
ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This
authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’
work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world
at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the
Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced
— supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of
being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to
hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently
captured by a fixed natural order.
In many
ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes
would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but
modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images
tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a
livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling
to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural
world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from
individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge
has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass
extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an
outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to
disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of
knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We
discount such a lesson at our peril.
Rhapsodies
in Blue Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes. By Paige Hirschey. The Public Domain Review,
December 6, 2023.
In an
extract from an essay accompanying a newly published facsimile, Peter Walther
tells the story of how this remarkable publication came about.
British
Algae (1843-53) by Anna Atkins is thought to be the first book to be
illustrated using photographic images. The English botanist (1799-1871)
produced her collection using the cyanotype technique, which she became aware
of through her father’s friendship with its inventor, John Herschel. Later this
month, Taschen is publishing a facsimile of British Algae alongside Atkins’s
other book, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853). Below is an extract
from an accompanying essay by Peter Walther, detailing Atkins’s development of
the book.
Anna Atkins
herself had collected and dried most of the plants included in British Algae.
At harvest time, the algae were immediately rinsed in water, then taken home
where she used dissecting forceps and camelhair brushes to remove extraneous
matter, before finally pressing and drying them. Since the backs of many of
Atkins’ images are pale blue in colour, we can assume that she did not always
sensitize the paper with a brush or sponge. Instead, she immersed it in
chemical solutions. To create a cyanotype, Atkins placed the plants on to the
suitably prepared paper set into a copy frame, which she then covered with a
glass plate so as to guarantee the closest possible contact with the support
surface. The result was a lavishly detailed outline image. Areas only partly
permeable to light appeared brighter in the image than those fully exposed,
while denser algae were less distinctly visible.
Alongside
the specimen, a label showing the name of the plant was placed on the paper.
The label indicating the plant’s name was first dipped in oil to make it
transparent, so that when exposed to the light only the script remained.
Depending
on the weather and the intensity of the sun the copy frames were left [...] for
between five and 15 minutes. After a time, the paper would turn to a yellowish
green colour which, after the sheets were rinsed in water, turned to a more or
less intense blue.
Anna Atkins
gave her cyanotypes serial numbers. Even when she examined the plant numerous
times, there were some noticeable differences between specimens belonging to
the same series. Before each exposure, the algae were rearranged on the
prepared paper. Sometimes they appeared in reverse in the image, but at other
times they seemed to have moved only a short distance. The intensity of the
blue varied from one species to another. October 1843 saw the publication of
around 15 copies of the first volume of British Algae, which she dedicated to
her father. In a foreword, Atkins reflected on the reasons why she had produced
the book. “The difficulty of making accurate drawings, so minute as many of the
Algae and Confervae, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s
beautiful process of the Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants
themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.”
The first
editions of the album were sent to the Royal Society, Herschel, [Henry Fox]
Talbot, the minerology and photo pioneer Robert Hunt and the book collector
Thomas Phillips. The British Museum, the Linnean Society of London and the
botanical gardens in London and Edinburgh were similarly honoured. [...] In the
subsequent years leading up to the spring of 1849, a total of ten volumes, each
containing twelve prints, [were sewn] together by hand. The recipients were
responsible for collating and binding the sections together.
Anna Atkins
and the Algae : how the first photobook was made in the mid-1800s. By José Da
Silva. The Art Newspaper, May 2, 2023.
The plants
are white as ghosts, and they float in fields as sharply blue as the waters off
Dover. Each one is a little miracle, their neuron-like roots winding across the
page, their leaves revealing every branching vein. These are photographs,
produced only with the light of the sun and an amateur’s chemistry set. There
was no precedent for them in the early 1840s — when a woman invented the
photobook.
She was the
British photographer Anna Atkins, who may not be as well known as Louis
Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot and other men from the medium’s first
decade. But her intensely beautiful blueprints of marine plants, which she
began making in 1843, are as significant for the development of photography as
for the history of science.
Her magnum
opus, “Photographs of British Algae,” whose first sections she published 175
years ago this fall, was the first volume ever to be illustrated with
photographs, albeit ones made without a camera. Dozens of pages from that book
are on view in “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins,” on the
interplay of science and art at the main branch of the New York Public Library.
Atkins was
born in 1799, in the southeast of England; her father, John George Children,
was an amateur chemist who went on to work for the British Museum. He also
translated several important scientific treatises into English, like an 1823
taxonomy of shells that young Anna painstakingly illustrated for him. He
encouraged his daughter’s interest in the natural world; the New York Public
Library’s show includes an early herbarium in which she pressed dried thistles
and mint sprigs, and an album of tender watercolor landscapes, begun in 1835
and continued for decades after, that Anna painted as a gift to her husband,
the Kent landowner John Pelly Atkins.
In 1839,
William Henry Fox Talbot announced that he had discovered a new means of
“photogenic drawing,” which could trace the details of plants, fabrics or the
like on light-sensitized paper. (Photography has the rare distinction of being
invented twice: Daguerre and Talbot hit on two different techniques,
independently of each other, in the same year.) Talbot presented his technique
at the Royal Society, of which John George Children was the secretary, and Anna
Atkins would soon correspond with Talbot through her father. Like Talbot, she
saw that the new technology of photography would allow for a greater scientific
accuracy in botanical illustration — which until then had relied either on
letterpress printing, which was only as good as its illustrators, or else on
dried specimens that turned brittle before long.
She began
to collect seaweed from the southeast coast of England and the ponds around
Kent, and she implored friends to lend their own specimens. Then, starting in
1843, she started producing “photographical impressions” of these algae, “many
of which,” as she wrote in a letter displayed in the show, “are so minute that
accurate drawings of them are very difficult to make.”
Her chosen
technique was the cyanotype — or blueprint, as it would later be known when architects
embraced it. You first slather a sheet of paper with a solution of iron salts,
then leave it to dry. Next, you place an object on the paper and compress it
under a pane of glass. Leave it in the sun for about 15 minutes, then wash the
exposed sheet in water, and the uncovered portion of the paper takes on a rich
Prussian blue.
The rest of
the sheet, obscured by the compressed algae or leaves, features a white
negative impression, like an X-ray or a snow angel. The species Dictyota
dichotoma becomes a bundle of thick, tangled rhizomes, while Furcellaria
fastigiata comprises spindlier, daintier strands that look like nerve endings.
One seaweed specimen has the density of a chanterelle mushroom; another appears
more like a tangle of fallen feathers.
Yet these
are clearly more than an amateur scientist’s recordings. Atkins laid down the
plants on the page with a careful eye to composition, often with an attempt at
symmetry. Pairs of specimens are arrayed like nearly identical siblings;
thicker seaweed results in more indistinct, abstract skeins. The algae bristle
and undulate in Atkins’s cyanotypes, whose rich blues, of course, recall the
ocean. Even the captions exhibit a playful inventiveness. For the title page of
one chapter of her book, she fashioned the letters in “British Algae” out of
wispy strands of seaweed, forming its name out of its subject.
As
cyanotypes are not made from a negative, each Atkins photogram was
one-of-a-kind — making “British Algae” an arduous enterprise that took a decade
of labor. (Servants would likely have helped her, though we know next to
nothing about her working process.) The resultant books were different, too.
Atkins mailed the pages to subscribers as she completed them; readers then
sewed the fascicles together as they pleased.
Her efforts
to circulate her work, both to eminent botanists and to photography pioneers
like Talbot (who was then completing his own first book, “The Pencil of
Nature”), make Atkins quite a different figure from other undersung women now
enjoying the attention of New York museums — like Orra White Hitchcock, whose
scientific illustrations for her husband’s university lessons were shown at the
American Folk Art Museum this summer, or Hilma af Klint, the Swedish
theosophist whose groundbreaking abstract paintings, now on view at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, were not exhibited during her lifetime. Atkins, while
reserved, was no outsider, and her blueprints are as significant for who saw
them as for what they depicted. The New York Public Library’s collection of
Atkins’s photograms, for one, belonged to John Herschel, the inventor of the
cyanotype process.
The library
has supplemented its showcase of Atkins with a pendant show upstairs, “Anna
Atkins Refracted,” featuring 19 contemporary photographers. Most of them make
use of cameraless photography techniques; a good number also engage with themes
of botany or the place of women in science. The German photographer Ulf Saupe
has created a rich cyanotype that resembles one of Atkins’s undulating algae,
but is in fact an impression of a plastic bag afloat in the ocean. Strange,
wonderful photograms by Letha Wilson begin from impressions of found flowers
and industrial objects; she then folds the exposed sheets, photographs them
(with a camera), and reprints the uncanny, Bauhaus-ish result.
It’s worth
returning to the Atkins exhibition once you’ve seen this contemporary showcase,
to look again at her blueprints with an eye on their aesthetic daring. “British
Algae” has its place in the history of photography and book publishing, but
these resonant cyanotypes are also artifacts from a time when science and art were
better acquainted. The plants look like river deltas, like plumes of smoke,
like controlled detonations, like lightning bolts scything through darkness.
The question of whether photography was art would roil audiences for more than
a century to come — but Atkins already had the answer.
She Needed
No Camera to Make the First Book of Photographs. By Jason Farago. The New York Times,
November 15, 2018.
If a picture
is worth a thousand words, then photo books offer even richer narratives.
Invented in the 19th century, the form allows for pictorial storytelling, in
collectible format. Carefully arranged images convey a photographer’s larger
aesthetic aims: Robert Frank’s iconic 1958 monograph The Americans offers a
lyrical glimpse of post-war society, while Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of
Sexual Dependency still induces nostalgia for New York bohemia. Unlike the
temporary nature of an exhibition, photo books are always available for return
visits.
The tale of
photo books themselves began in 19th-century England, with a surprising subject
matter and inventor: an amateur botanist named Anna Atkins, whose work is
straightforwardly described in the book’s title, Photographs of British Algae:
Cyanotype Impressions.
Raised in
restrictive 1800s Britain,Atkins created her groundbreaking document with
support and mentorship from her progressive, scientist father, John George
Children. Atkins’s monograph proved that a new creative medium also had
important practical implications for non-artistic disciplines.
Atkins was
born in 1799 in Kent, England, and was raised by Children, her mother having
died shortly after childbirth. Children, a chemist, encouraged Atkins’s developing
passion for botany. Though society dictated strict gender roles—women were
expected to be content as homemakers—Children wanted to raise his daughter
differently. He offered Atkins and her friends science lessons, and employed
Atkins as his lab assistant.
Atkins was
also intrigued by photography, a medium still in its nascent stages. She
maintained a correspondence with William Henry Fox Talbot, who pioneered the
early field of photography. In 1841, Talbot had patented the calotype, which
employed a light-sensitive paper coated with silver nitrate that, when exposed
to light, recorded light and shadow.
Talbot
wasn’t the only Brit to experiment with photography. Children’s circle of
friends included Sir John Herschel, an astronomer and chemist who, in 1842,
developed another light-sensitive paper that recorded images against a blue
background, which he called the cyanotype. The form became a means of
reproducing drawings, in particular, architectural blueprints.
In 1841,
English physician William H. Harvey published Manual of British Algae; Atkins
found the work visually insufficient. Indeed, Harvey had listed and described
all the new algae specimens he could find, without offering any illustrations.
Atkins, empowered to create her own version, made cyanotypes to imprint the
images of algae for posterity. Herschel himself probably taught the process to
Atkins.
Today,
algae might seem a rather banal subject for history’s first book of
photography. Yet New York Public Library curator Joshua Chuang believes that
Harvey’s manual and Atkins’s subsequent work were part of a larger natural
history craze in Britain. People were cataloging plant life, attempting to
harness the multiplicity of nature. “[Some] of the great mysteries of the
natural world [were] things from the sea,” he said. “And algae were accessible,
beautiful, and various.”
This fall,
Chuang is mounting two exhibitions at the library: “Blue Prints: The Pioneering
Photographs of Anna Atkins” and “Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works”
(co-curated by Elizabeth Cronin, the NYPL’s assistant curator of photography).
The first exhibition examines Atkins’s achievements, while the second addresses
Atkins’s influence on and resonance within contemporary art practice.
“Blue
Prints” will include multiple copies of Atkins’s photo-illustrated manuscript.
Between 1843 and 1853, she created and distributed the pages filled with
cyanotypes that would become her book, distributing the tome in parts, bound in
soft covers. Atkins sent the book to acquaintances, who had to visit
bookbinders to sew the different sections together. In all, Atkins produced 17
handmade copies; because of her process, however, no two were alike.
Today,
Atkins’s book manifests an ethereal beauty. White, feathery outlines of algae
ripple across deep blue backgrounds. Elegant white type along the bottom of
each cyanotype gives each species’ name—all sounding, to the untrained ear,
more like mystical incantations than botanical designations: Chordaria
flagelliformis, Polysiphonia affinis, Cystoseira granulata.
When Atkins
died in 1871, her name faded in and out of history. Influential personalities
of her time, including Scottish book collector William Lang Jr., recognized her
achievement. In 1864, Lang read an article by Talbot about non-silver
photographic processes that mentioned Atkins’s work, without mentioning her
name. “Lang was so entranced that he thought to himself, ‘I have to find a
copy,’” recounted Chuang. After a several-year search, Lang identified a London
bookseller with the manuscript and bought it in 1888. He wrote an article about
the book in an 1889–90 volume of the Proceedings of the Philosophical Society
of Glasgow.
Lang,
however, still wasn’t sure who’d created the book: Atkins had signed her work
“AA,” leading him to conclude that the initials stood for “Anonymous Amateur.”
A few weeks after Lang published his piece, a curator from London’s Natural
History Museum wrote to the journal editor and said that he, too, owned a copy
of the book in question, and he knew it was by a Mrs. Atkins. Lang embarked on
a series of public exhibitions and lectures, conducting, said Chuang, something
“almost like an Anna Atkins roadshow.”
Lang’s finances
suffered towards the end of his life, and he had to sell off a portion of his
library that included Photographs of British Algae. When he died in the early
1900s, Atkins lost a major champion. According to Chuang, a 1955 history of
photography included her name, along with just a few sentences.
Finally, in
the 1970s, an art historian named Larry Schaaf, working at the University of
Texas at Austin, discovered Atkins’s work and attempted to piece together her
biography. “He basically put her on the map not only as a pioneer of
photography, but also the first person to publish a photographically
illustrated book,” said Chuang. In 1985, Schaaf helped re-publish Atkins’s work
in Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms.
In the
years since, contemporary curators have bolstered Atkins’s reputation. In 2004,
the Drawing Center in New York and the Yale Center for British Art organized a
show—“Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature in the Victorian Era”—of
19th-century botanical photography, which included prints by Atkins alongside
those of Talbot and Herschel. A 2010–11 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
entitled “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” included
Atkins’s cyanotypes alongside work by Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and other
women photography leaders.
Curators,
scholars, and artists alike are ensuring that Atkins’s name remains integral to
art canon. Her story, like so many others, reminds us that artistic innovation
isn’t enough to secure an adequate legacy—future generations must write about
and champion worthy projects. Atkins’s brilliant work, which was nearly lost to
history, is getting a new chance to shine
The 19th-Century
Botanist Who Changed The Course of Photography. By Alina Cohen. Artsy, October 16, 2018
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