Anna Atkins (1799–1871) came to photography by way of botany. Rather than draw her specimens, she laid the plants themselves on paper sensitised with iron salts, pressed them under glass and let the sun finish the job. What remains is a white silhouette on a ground of deep Prussian blue — at once a botanical record and one of the earliest surviving bodies of photographic work made by a woman.

This volume, published by Art Meets Science in 2023, gathers her Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns. The material was first issued in 1853 and belongs to the small group of books that first showed what photography could do as a printing medium rather than a curiosity. More than a hundred fern specimens appear here, their fronds, pinnae and spore cases carried through a full tonal range, at a page scale of roughly 23 by 16 centimetres.

What holds the sequence together is its double life. Read one way, it is a taxonomic album, a working aid for identifying species native and foreign. Read another, it is an exercise in abstraction, in which the architecture of a leaf is reduced to outline by the chemistry of the process. Atkins was a serious botanist as well as an image-maker, and the two ambitions never compete for the same page.

Emily Gillis contributes an introduction. The hardcover format runs to 128 pages, which keeps the plates close together and makes it easy to follow repetitions and variations across the collection.

For a collector, the argument rests less on fashion than on position. Atkins’ original cyanotypes are light-sensitive, fragile and dispersed among institutions; the fern album sits at a crossroads of photographic history and botanical illustration. A carefully made modern edition lets you look closely at the plates as she made them, and at the moment when science and photography briefly shared a single method.