Anna Atkins began making cyanotypes in 1843, a year after Sir John Herschel worked out the process, using it to record and circulate information about the plants in her herbarium. The book that grew out of that effort, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, is generally described as the first publication illustrated with photographs.

Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, published by Prestel in 2018, is a revised and expanded edition of a monograph on Atkins that had long been out of circulation. It traces her work beyond the algae into the following decade, when she and her friend Anne Dixon turned to flowering plants, feathers and other specimens. Atkins (1799–1871) came of age in Victorian England and was guided by her father, a prominent scientist; she took up photography with the encouragement of William Henry Fox Talbot and was a friend of Herschel.

The volume rests on sustained research into her production and its setting. Larry John Schaaf writes the principal text, with contributions from Joshua Chuang, Emily Walz and Mike Ware. The supplementary essays address both her methods and the cyanotype itself, a process artists still use. The book is copublished by The New York Public Library and DelMonico Books, and was named among the New York Times best photo books of 2018.

Scale is part of the argument. At 216 pages and roughly 32 by 26 centimetres, in hardcover, the book gives Atkins’s delicate, deeply coloured and intricately detailed prints room to be read at something like their own dimensions.

For a collector, the case is archival as much as aesthetic. This edition reworks and extends the earlier study, gathering the scholarship around Atkins into a single reference and returning to a body of work made where botany, printing and photography meet. Atkins was among the first to see what the new medium could do for science, and her images retain a position in the history of photography that few comparable groups of pictures occupy.