Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (45th Edition)
In 1843, a Victorian botanist in Kent began laying ferns and seaweed directly onto light-sensitive paper and leaving them in the sun. The result was the Prussian blue photograms that make up British Algae and Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, the two albums that made Anna Atkins the first person to publish a book illustrated entirely with photography, and the first woman to use the medium for scientific work. This edition brings both works together in full for the first time in one volume.
Atkins didn't invent the cyanotype process; that credit belongs to her friend and fellow scientist John Herschel. What she did was see what it could do. As a trained botanist already producing detailed scientific illustrations by hand, she recognised that the process could record a specimen's exact form with a precision no draughtsman could match, while also producing something genuinely beautiful. Working with her friend Anne Dixon on the fern volume, she fixed each specimen onto sensitised paper and exposed it to sunlight, leaving behind pale, ghostly silhouettes against a deep cyanotype blue.
This 45th edition reproduces almost 400 of these cyanotype impressions, drawn from copies held by the New York Public Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Alongside the plates, photography historian Peter Walther contributes a set of introductory essays that place Atkins' work in its scientific and art-historical context, and give her the recognition she was denied for much of the twentieth century. A short biography of Walther, whose other books include The First World War in Colour and New Deal Photography, is included.
The book is a substantial hard-cover at 512 pages, with text in English, French and German. It suits anyone drawn to botanical illustration, the history of photography, or simply the particular blue that still defines architectural blueprints today.
It's a considered gift for a photographer, a gardener, a design-minded reader, or anyone who already has a well-thumbed copy of TASCHEN's other books in the 45th Edition series.
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