A kind of blue…

Seven wild women / Anna Atkins

There is a blue that falters the step, that journeys the eye beyond the physical, that invites you to step inside, to surrender to the void and allow yourself to become consumed.  When lying in the sun there it is under the skin of your lower eyelid, there it is again just before a star pricked dawn, a palms width above the horizon, above that impossible belt of deep verdigris.  It stops time, snatches your breath, countless moments we have spent sat amongst cliff top cushions of thrift paralysed by its hypnotic perfection, Gannets harpooning it's unfathomable presence suspended somewhere between the surface, the ocean floor and eternity, always out of reach.

Spinning unique through the pitch vacuum of space rolls a brilliant blue marble, our home, it's that blue that sustains all life on earth, yet pouring ourselves a glass of that blue stuff and we see a clear fluid, this is because water absorbs red light frequencies therefore allowing blue to become more visible.  We don't notice this in small quantities, it's only in larger volumes that our eyes start to notice the familiar blue tint, add disturbed sediment and particles into the solution and the blue light bounces around a lot more creating the more familiar ocean green blue ting.  In its palest manifestation, this colour is known as cyan and is found in many places in nature, like Guillemot eggs and Kingfisher feathers, the natural gas methane burns this colour, clouds of methane are the reason Uranus has a cyan tint (its ok to laugh), anyone who has a canine pal will know all about the dangers of blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, so called because of its use of photosynthetic pigments to create food, photocyanin (blue), chlorophyll (green).  So it is with cyan and algae that we arrive quite neatly at the door of the first of our seven wild women, Anna Atkins.

Born in Kent in 1799 Anna sadly lost her mother before her first birthday due to complications that arose from her delivery, so forming an extremely close bond to her father John, a very well-respected zoologist, she grew up absorbed in an alchemic era of discovery and exploration and even though women were barred from practicing science, had her curiosity nourished by her father who encouraged an interest in botany. In an era where botanical collecting and illustration was becoming a fashionable and ‘accepted’ pastime for women Anna shone. Her father now the first president of the Royal Entomological Society (basically a posh insect club) is where Anna made sure her foot was firmly wedged in the door to a vast specimen cabinet, before anyone could shout binomial nomenclature!  The foot was swiftly followed by an elbow and a shoulder, she was in. Working day and night Anna built up her observational and illustrative skills, so much so that in her early twenties was commissioned to produce 256 graphite and watercolour illustrations to be later published in Jean Baptiste de Lamark’s catalogue ‘Genera of shells’.  Not simply scientifically accurate, these images have a soul, capturing the intricate brittle micro-landscapes and fragile chalky surfaces of sea shells, gentle and aqueous, more portraits of place than object, she was painting in a language of habitat, of shoreline and ocean. 

Later becoming acquainted with Willian Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the salted paper and calotype photographic process, Anna learnt various methods developed by Talbot including his ‘photogenic drawing’ technique, where various objects are placed upon photosensitive paper, then exposed to sunlight to leave shadowy impressions of the objects.  This method of producing an image lead Anna to become fascinated with a similar method of capturing reality, the newly invented cyanotype photographic process. The practice of cyanotype photography is very basic, a piece of paper is coated in a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, an object or photographic negative is place on the paper and left in the sun, after a few hours the paper is rinsed in water and an image ghosts into view. Anna realised very quickly that this was a cheap, scientifically accurate and practical method of recording her pressed wildflower specimens and it was not soon after this that a creative penny must have dropped, the connection between the pristine blue of a cyanotype and the organic fluid form of a seaweed specimen is a match made in, well, in water. Placing dry pressed specimens onto the treated pages she set to work to create her delicate, meticulous and breath-taking studies, the sublime marriage of colour and subject matter is perfectly complimented by the immaculate positioning of each specimen on the page.  Anna self-published three volumes of this work titled, ‘photographs of British algae. Cyanotype impressions’, between 1843 and 1853, the rarity of such beauty is mirrored in the quantity of copies left in existence, only seventeen of these books survive, the most complete copy is kept at the Horniman museum in London and contains 443 plates. 

We celebrate Anna Atkins today for her strength of character, persistence and fearless creative expression in an opinionated and oppressive male dominated environment, she is now widely acknowledged as being not only the first woman to have created a photograph, but also the first person in history to have a book published that is illustrated with photographic images.  She was a scientist and artist, yet never really credited as either, her work remains contemporary, relevant and unequalled.  Timeless works of ethereal depth and elegance, they display an understanding of life and form that comes only from a profound connection to the nature world, even to those with no understanding of what it is that they are observing.  One glance at Anna's cyanotypes rewards one with a lucid sense of ocean, it’s a shell to the ear moment, the swell and sway of water lifting you, weightless, taken.