Science, artistry mix
Anna Atkins died in 1871, but her story is only now being fully written, and it’s no staid Victorian tale. Joshua Chuang speaks of her in an urgent whisper. Granted, he works in a library — as the New York Public Library’s Miriam & Ira D. Wallach associate director for art, prints and photographs and as the Robert B. Menschel senior curator of photography — but he describes his research on the groundbreaking photographer with the gasps of wonder and discovery more commonly associated with suspense novels than academic scholarship. “This has been a detective game,” he says, “and it’s been thrilling.”
Chuang has co-curated, with photo historian Larry J. Schaaf, the first major survey of Atkins’ work ever assembled. “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins” gathers five volumes of her hauntingly beautiful cyanotype studies of seaweed, together with letters, watercolors and other archival material. When Chuang came to the library in 2016 he took a close look at its Atkins holdings. “I was blown away,” he recalls. “I had to re-think everything I knew about photography’s early years.”
Atkins may not have been the first female photographer, as once was claimed, but she was the first to have a sustained, significant practice using the new medium. Of even more consequence, she was the first maker of a photographically illustrated book. She issued the initial installment of “Photographs of British Algae” in 1843, months before William Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography’s inventors, produced “The Pencil of Nature,” long-lauded as the first photo book. Unlike Talbot’s commercially driven enterprise, Atkins made each of her publications individually, by hand, offering them to her “botanical friends,” she wrote, out of the shared widespread enthusiasm at the time for gathering and classifying specimens.
“Atkins’ main goal was to make something useful,” Chuang says. “In Victorian England, botany was one of the few areas of science where women’s contributions were tolerated.”