Mandy Barker’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections takes its title, and its method, from Anna Atkins’s 1843 volume. Where Atkins laid British marine algae on cyanotype paper, Barker lays out what the sea has returned: more than two hundred fragments of clothing gathered over ten years from 121 beaches between John O’Groats and Land’s End. Jackets, wigs, trainers, football shirts, underwear. Each is exposed as a photogram, producing a Prussian-blue silhouette that reads at a glance like a herbarium sheet and, on second look, like evidence.
The book is organised as a typology, not a narrative. A hardback of 160 pages and 76 images, it opens with outerwear—a waterproof, a parka—and closes with garments worn against the skin. That sequence, from the protective to the intimate, is the argument: synthetic clothing is shed across the coastline and dispersed into the water as microfibres, and the fashion industry’s annual emissions exceed those of all international flights and container ships combined.
Barker’s homage is studious without being reverent. She replicates the structure of Atkins’s original with 202 illustrations in the full project, substituting garments and fibres for botanical specimens; this book is the carefully edited selection from that replica. The result is a meeting of Victorian scientific illustration and contemporary environmental concerns.
The larger replica project was made to mark the 180th anniversary of Atkins’s book. This edited publication was issued by GOST Books in April 2025: a 160-page hardback measuring 199 by 256 mm, with 76 images.
