Paper brushed with iron salts and dried in the dark. A frond of seaweed, collected, pressed, carried home.
place press light lift wash
The frond has not touched the paper yet.
Move it where you want it.
A lens, for afterwards.
Nothing here was drawn. The plant made the picture by standing in the way of the light — so the picture is a measurement of where the plant was.
the same act, several hundred times, by one pair of hands
photograms in the fullest surviving copies of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, issued privately in parts by Anna Atkins from October 1843 into the 1850s. Every plate a contact print like the one you just made — no engraving, no drawing, no printer's ink.
Plate counts differ between copies; “about 389” is the figure usually given for the most complete sets in institutional descriptions. The standard study is Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins (1985; revised edition with the New York Public Library, 2018). Catalogue records for surviving copies at the British Library, the New York Public Library (Spencer Collection), the Rijksmuseum and the Royal Society describe contents and variation.turn over
“The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algæ and Confervæ, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel's beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves.” Anna Atkins, prefatory note, Part I, October 1843
source-attributed
where this text is read
The note is itself a cyanotype of her handwriting, bound at the front of the parts. It is transcribed in Schaaf, Sun Gardens, and in the catalogue descriptions of surviving copies. We have not modernised her spelling.
She had already spent years drawing.
In 1823 she made over two hundred careful drawings of shells to illustrate her father John George Children's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells. She knew exactly what a drawing costs, and where it fails.
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Lamarck, The Genera of Shells, translated by J. G. Children, with plates drawn by Anna Children (later Atkins), London, 1823. Described in Schaaf, Sun Gardens, and in Natural History Museum and Royal Society biographical accounts.
The process came from a friend of the house.
Sir John Herschel published the cyanotype in 1842: paper sensitised with iron salts, exposed to sunlight, washed in plain water. Her father was a chemist and a secretary of the Royal Society; the family were in contact with Herschel and with Talbot. She had the method within months of its description.
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J. F. W. Herschel, “On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours, and on some new Photographic Processes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1842. Chemistry: ammonium iron(III) citrate with potassium ferricyanide; ultraviolet light reduces the iron, forming Prussian blue; washing removes the unreacted salts and the blue deepens as it dries.
She followed a book that had no pictures.
William Henry Harvey's Manual of the British Algae (1841) supplied the arrangement and the names, and carried no plates at all. Her work answers it page for page: the specimens themselves, in the order of the manual, under the manual's names.
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W. H. Harvey, A Manual of the British Algae, London, 1841. The relationship between Harvey's nomenclature and Atkins's sequence is set out in Schaaf, Sun Gardens, and repeated in institutional descriptions of the parts.
The words were made with sunlight too.
Title page, note, every caption — all of it handwritten and contact-printed, so the letters are white where her ink stopped the light. There is no type anywhere in the book. Naming was the same physical act as picturing.
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Visible in every digitised copy: text pages appear as white script on blue ground, in her hand, with corrections and variations between parts. See catalogue descriptions of the copies at the New York Public Library (Spencer Collection) and the Rijksmuseum.
She gave it away, part by part.
Not sold through the book trade: sent in instalments over roughly a decade to botanical friends and to institutions, with instructions and replacement plates following later. The book arrived in people's hands slowly, the way the plants had arrived on the shore.
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Distribution in parts, with accompanying notes to recipients, is documented in Schaaf, Sun Gardens, and reflected in the differing composition of surviving copies held by the Royal Society, the British Library and others.
She did not put her name on it.
The prefatory note is signed with initials. For a long stretch afterwards the plates travelled through sales and collections with her authorship blurred or unrecorded; the reconstruction of who made them, and in what order, is largely modern research.
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Attribution history and the reconstruction of sequence and copy census: Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens (1985; rev. 2018). Counts of surviving copies vary between sources and are usually given in the high teens; treat any single number as approximate.
She kept doing it with someone else.
Through the 1850s she made further cyanotype albums of ferns and flowering plants with her friend Anne Dixon. The act you performed once was, for her, a habit of decades.
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Albums by Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon from the 1850s survive in museum and library collections, including examples at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the New York Public Library.
No two copies are alike.
Because each plate was exposed separately, in whatever light that day gave, and because owners bound their parts differently, the copies diverge: different plate counts, different sequences, the same species darker in one book than in another.
Your own plates, if you made more than one, already differ from each other in exactly this way — a longer hold, a flatter press, a specimen that lay slightly off the paper.
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Variation between copies is described in Schaaf, Sun Gardens, and is directly observable when digitised copies at different institutions are compared plate by plate. The reading of that variation as a record of daylight and of assembly is our own, and is not drawn from the sources.
Nothing on this screen is an Atkins page.
The sheet you exposed, the frond you lifted, the plates on your shelf: all of it was drawn in code, here, now. It is an honest model of the physical relation — contact, light, removal, trace — and it is not a photograph of anything. Her cyanotypes are objects: paper, iron, sunlight, ink, thread. They are held in libraries, and they can be looked at.
- British Library, London — copy of the parts
- New York Public Library, Spencer Collection — digitised copy
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam — digitised copy
- Royal Society, London — copy from her circle
- J. Paul Getty Museum — Atkins & Dixon albums
- Search each catalogue for: Photographs of British Algae
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We have not reproduced archival images on this station, and we do not link to substitutes: a drawn model presented beside a real plate teaches the wrong thing about what survives. The standard reference for the work as a whole remains Larry J. Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins (1985; revised edition, New York Public Library / Prestel, 2018).
The specimen went back on the table. The place where it lay is still in the paper.