Anna Atkins, an English botanist born in 1799, began using the cyanotype process for botany in 1843, just after John Herschel invented it in 1842, printing her specimens by simple contact, white on a blue background.
Cyanotype was born in the mind of an astronomer, but it was a botanist who immediately turned it into a scientific tool, and this meeting between a brand-new chemical process and a naturalist's eye gave Prussian blue its first great adventure.
Anna Atkins, a contemporary of the invention, understood that a paper sensitive to ultraviolet light could record the exact shape of a plant by simple contact, and she took it up in its very first years.
This page focuses on Anna Atkins herself, who she was and what she brought to cyanotype, without straying into an analysis of her book of algae or her status as a pioneer of photography, which are covered separately. It forms part of the history of cyanotype, which traces the process from its invention to its uses, and the complete guide to cyanotype recaps its chemistry if needed.
An English botanist of the 19th century
Anna Atkins was an English botanist born in 1799, trained in the observation of plants in a scientific milieu that was rare for a woman of her time.
Her father, the naturalist John George Children, was connected with the Royal Society, and it was in this learned circle that she grew up, drew natural history plates and became familiar very early on with the natural sciences and their debates. This singular place in a world of men also feeds the question of whether she was the first female photographer in history.
This background explains her approach, because she did not come to cyanotype as an artist but as a naturalist seeking to represent her specimens accurately. Botanical drawing, which she already practised to illustrate scientific works, demanded long work from her that was always interpreted by the hand, whereas the new process promised a direct and faithful imprint of the plant itself.
Cyanotype applied to science from 1843
The process was developed by John Herschel in 1842, and Atkins, through her father, learned of it almost immediately. From 1843 she applied it to botany, laying specimens on paper coated with the two iron salts to obtain their imprint in white on a blue background, which makes her one of the very first people to use photography for scientific purposes.
Her technique is that of the photogram, an image obtained by simple contact, with no camera or lens. The plant laid on the sensitive paper blocks the ultraviolet light where it touches, the sun exposes the rest, and rinsing reveals the pale silhouette of the plant against the insoluble Prussian blue.
Atkins did not photograph her plants, she printed them, and it was this faithfulness of contact that appealed to her for documentary use.
She aimed for rigour, an image that rendered outlines and veins without the detour of interpretation, exactly what a naturalist expects from a plate. Here the blue is only a means; what mattered in her eyes was the precision of the imprint.
Anna Atkins, Ferns. Specimen of Cyanotype, 1840s, cyanotype. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2007.15.1, R. K. Mellon Family Foundation. Public domain.
Why her approach matters
Anna Atkins's importance lies in this shift: she took a process that its inventor intended mainly for copying notes and drawings, and turned it into an instrument for the scientific description of living things. Where Herschel sought to reproduce his writings, she reproduced nature itself, and this move from copying documents to directly recording a specimen opened up a new path.
Her contribution can also be measured by her method as a naturalist, because she did not make a few isolated plates but patiently built up an organised body of work, specimen after specimen, in the spirit of a scientific inventory. It is this scale that has carried her name down to posterity, far beyond the circle of the first cyanotype experimenters.
It remains to weigh up what can be attributed to her without overstatement. She is often cited as a founding figure, and her role in the scientific application of cyanotype is firmly established, but broader claims about her place in the history of photography call for more nuance.
Is she therefore the first female photographer? The title is often given to her, but it remains disputed, and she is also presented, more cautiously, as one of the first female photographers.
Her book Photographs of British Algae, issued in instalments from 1843, is for its part often cited as the first book illustrated with photographs. According to Europeana, the European digital library, only eighteen more or less complete copies survive, held notably at the British Library, the Rijksmuseum, the Royal Society and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
From Atkins's plates to today's herbarium
Laying a fern on blue paper and revealing it in the sun means repeating exactly what she did nearly two centuries ago, with the same iron chemistry and the same principle of contact, which links contemporary creative work directly to this botanical lineage.
It is this continuity that the cyanotype herbarium carries on, where you compose plates of plants in the very spirit of Atkins, between inventory and image. The exact place of her approach in the long life of the process, from the architect's blueprint to today's uses, is to be found in the history of cyanotype.
The technique remains accessible with the same iron chemistry as in the 19th century, the one brought together in the cyanotype kit, and laying a plant on the sensitive paper is enough to rediscover, over a sunny afternoon, what botany was already recording from 1843.
Header image: Anna Atkins, Cystoseira granulata, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843). Public domain.
Éric Marais — Photographer, author of two books on pinhole photography (published by Pearson) and creator of the Sténoflex. He has run introductory workshops in alternative photography, from pinhole to cyanotype, from the very beginning.