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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 14/145
Anne Atkins: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions 1853.
At age 54 Atkins - a professional botanist and experimental scientific photographer - publishes an early book illustrated with photographs - her own cyanotype plates, contact-printed from her collec- tion of sea-weeds using sunlight, a process invented by John Herschel in 1842, and later developed by William Henry Fox Talbot. Herschel (who had earlier discovered that hyposulphate was a good fixative for exposed photographs) imagined that cyanotypes would be a good way of reproducing drawings and note-book pages (after all, it is the original blue-print), but Atkins deployed the tech- nique to make beautiful and faithful reproductions of her botanic collections. She was definitely the first woman to make a book of photographs - Fox Talbot had earlier published his Pencil of Nature (1842) illustrated with his ‘tipped-in’ images. It was not until the 1880s that a suitable photo-engrav-
ing process emerged to allow large-volume reproduction of photographic images - see George Meisen- bach: Halftone Printing Process (1882).