(click each to embiggen please! they’re delicately lovely bigger)
Whilst browsing the New York Public Library digital gallery (a wealth of fascinating images there) I was struck by “Cyanotypes of British Algae” the 1843 self-published book by English botanist Anna Atkins. The images above were produced using the Cyanotype process – essentially the same used for architecture and engineering ’blueprints’ – to record and illustrate marine flora. As Atkins explained in 1843:
The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and Confera, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves
NYPL informs us that the book is “a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means.”
Pioneering, scientific and, I think, quite beautiful.
See the whole set on the NYPL digital gallery here.
Love
P
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