Unanchored Seaweeds: Anna Atkins, Two Readings
Origin stories are complex. To speak of a singular inventor of photography is inaccurate. The process of the cyanotype is associated with the polymath John Herschel (1792 – 1871). Though cyanotypes were invented by Herschel, it was Anna Atkins (1799-1871) who made them.
Her cyanotypes are otherworldly. The organic objects they depict look alive, like something teased from soil, collected on a coastal walk or untangled from your legs in salt water. The photographs’ blue magic holds nearly two centuries after their arrival, and the cyanotype remains, as its inventor once put it, ‘beautiful in its effect (especially during the first few minutes of the appearance of the picture)’.[1]
In art history, Atkins is correctly distinguished from her other (often female) counterparts who practiced the art of assembling seaweed albums. She brought together botanical inquiry and the revolutionary process of photography. The fusion of the two makes for an altogether remarkable series that, for many, have never been surpassed. Atkins was one of several women who held a vision of photography that transcended the gendered restrictions of their age. Like them, she made her significant contributions against great odds, in a period when women were denied a formal scientific education.
Paternal figures play a central role in this story. Atkins’ introduction to the cyanotype was through her father, John George Children. A chemist, mineralogist and zoologist, he held all the appropriate connections to British scientific networks. Anna was raised without a mother, as she died soon after giving birth to her. It was her father who played the key role in supporting her education. As Secretary of the Royal Society, and through his relationships with William Henry Fox Talbot and John Herschel, he would be among the first to learn of photography’s invention. In time, Herschel and Atkins would go on to have dialogue of their own, a correspondence in blue. The New York Public Library holds a bound series of Atkins’ cyanotypes inscribed to ‘Sir John F.W. Herschel’. Not only was Atkins present at the birth of photography, she was an active participant. She brought into the world some of the most celebrated photographic prints ever made.
It wasn’t always this way. Despite her proximity to Herschel, Atkins went by A.A. in her publications and was known as thus for many years. In 1889, one writer even proposed that A.A. stood for ‘Anonymous Amateur’.[2] It was not until the pioneering work of Larry Schaaf in the 1980s, some century and a half after her death, that the importance of Atkins’ work began to be properly recognised. Like the foaming waves they depict, her work’s visibility seems cyclical; refreshed then washed away. More recently, it has been famed and reframed, as evidence of the ‘first woman photographer’, or the first photographically illustrated book. For Charlotte Cotton, however, such discussions tend to miss something crucial: the remarkable aesthetic value of the works.[3] Let us consider them on these terms.
[1] Herschel cited in Ware (1998)
[2] Iker, ‘Anna Atkins | MoMA’.
[3] Cotton and Derges, ‘Mortal Moon, Susan Derges and Charlotte Cotton in Conversation’.
Origin stories are complex. They are entangled, messy, speculative, unknown. The act of the cyanotype has a historical reliability. This object sat here. It was imprinted. Its permanence fixed to paper, like a blue tattoo. Weeds, algae, greens – flowers of the sea – plucked from the ground and elevated into a new blue paper state. One could write at length about their beauty. But what of their origin? After all, they were not the work of one woman: Atkins enjoyed the support of her friend and collaborator, Anne Dixon, and her servants played a hand in their production.
Classification was a central component of the work for Atkins; in fact, it was the reason she set out to make these images. But the classificatory process all too often escapes the attention of Atkins’ admirers who remain in the grip of the visual pleasures of the work. Take the image inscribed by Atkins as Gleichenia Immersa Jamaica. What led an English woman in Kent to have access to botanical clippings from Jamaica? A clue might be found at the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.
Paternal figures play a central role in this story. In the summer of 1825, Anna married a close friend of her father’s, John Pelly Atkins. His own father, John Alderman Atkins, held extensive slave-holding plantations in Jamaica. Following the abolition of slavery in 1807, Alderman Atkins received significant compensations in the form of reparations between 1835 and 1837; approximately £18,000 (£1.4M in today’s money). For each enslaved woman and man (and several were ‘owned’ jointly with his son, John, Anna’s husband), he received twenty pounds.[1] Anna’s marital home was a direct benefactor of this long history of transatlantic enslavement, and not only in the form of reparations: when her husband’s father died in 1838, he inherited his vast land holdings in Jamaica.
New questions arise. These beautiful, camera-less blueprints now appear submerged in murkier waters where histories once concealed come into view. What labour funded and sustained the making of these images? Tina Campt invites us to listen to images, to hear the quiet hum of the colonial archive.[2] What resonates is a material imprint of empire and enslavement. Is it not time that we listened to early photography in this way? As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has argued, the arrival of photography did not ‘halt the process of plunder but accelerated it and provided further opportunities to pursue it’.[3] Atkins’ images may not have served the high offices of empire building, but neither were they removed from such globally entangled histories.
For me, the prints are now unstable, they are misleading in the comforting floral oceans they depict. A fundamental enjoyment of these works has always been the meeting of an artistic and scientific pursuit; a work born from maternal loss and paternal teaching; women transgressing boundaries; paper prints, defying what we know as a ‘photograph’. And yet, the tropical specimens bound in gold have a salty aftertaste. Atkins serves as an invitation to read early photography in its colonial context. The difficult ways in which her work is imbricated in familial connections to transatlantic enslavement should be heard. Such ‘inconveniences’ have been brushed over, but they can be brought into view. Let us consider them on these terms.
[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/22420 See also Schaaf, Sun Gardens, 53–54.
[2] Campt, ‘Writing to Images’.
[3] Azoulay, Potential History.