Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes gathers, in a substantial 2023 hardcover from Taschen, the complete contents of two foundational works: British Algae (1843–1853) and Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853). Atkins used the newly developed cyanotype process to record algae and ferns for botanical study, placing specimens directly onto sensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight. The resulting Prussian-blue grounds and pale botanical silhouettes are at once precise records and quietly arresting images.
Atkins’s importance lies in the way these books join scientific purpose to photographic invention. She was the first woman to employ photography for scientific ends and the first to recognize the method’s practical value for botany and taxonomy alongside its visual possibilities. Her pages do not merely reproduce specimens: they establish a format in which classification, observation, and composition operate together. The books also occupy a decisive place in the history of the photobook, as among the first volumes to feature photographic images.
This edition reprints both albums in their entirety, bringing together more than 550 cyanotype impressions compiled from copies held by the New York Public Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Peter Walther’s introductory essays situate Atkins’s work within its scientific and art-historical contexts, while the sequence allows the sustained logic of the original projects to emerge. For collectors, its value is chiefly intellectual and documentary: it presents a landmark body of nineteenth-century photographic practice as a coherent, fully accessible book-object rather than as a selection of isolated images. At 660 pages, the volume offers unusual scope for studying Atkins’s method, recurring forms, and the delicate tension between botanical accuracy and abstraction.
