Page 70 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Anne Atkins: Photographs of British Algae 1864 (Cyanotype-illustrated book))
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 collection 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 invented hyposulphate fixative) imagined that cyanotypes would be a good way of reproducing drawings and note-book pages (after all, it is the orginal blue-print), but Atkins deployed the technique 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-engraving process emerged to allow large-volume reproduction of photographic images - see George Meisenbach: Halftone Printing Process (1882).
The discovery - by Herschel, Fox Talbot, Atkins and others, that camera-less photography could be a perfect illustration medium for scientists is really embodied in this early photographic book by Atkins, which consists of litho or letterpress-printed pages with 'tipped-in' (glued upon one edge) original cyanotype prints by Atkins, made by arranging her specimens over a sensitised paper, under a glass plate, and exposing to direct sunlight. One of the real inventors of photography, Thomas Wedgwood, had used camera-less techniques to explore the medium in the 1790s. These early examples, held implications for art too, especially for the modernist avant garde: - look at the spate of camera-less art produced in the early 20th century (by artists such as Christian Schad: Schadograms; Man Ray: Rayograms, László Moholy-Nagy: photograms, Francis Brugiere, Mikhail Tarkhanov, etc).
In 1932, Moholy-Nagy wrote: " The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography. It allows us to capture the patterned interplay of light on a sheet of sinister paper without recourse to any apparatus. The photogram opens up perspectives of a wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical laws peculiar to itself. It is the most completely dematerialised medium which the new vision commands.”
from Moholy-Nagy: A New Instrument of Vision (1932) quoted in Martin Barnes: Shadow Catchers - Camera-less Photography 2010)