At the dawn of the Victorian era, Anna Atkins undertook a radical experiment in her open-air laboratory in Halstead, Kent: documenting plant species using an entirely new artistic medium. The inimitable cyanotype photograms of algae and ferns that Atkins produced became the first books illustrated with photographs. Her albums are a perfect synthesis of art and science, striking yet extraordinarily delicate.

Although the printing process of cyanotype was discovered by her friend John Herschel, Atkins was the first to recognize its practical value for classifying species in botany, as well as its fascinating artistic potential. In this process, the object is placed on sensitized paper and exposed to direct sunlight. This creates the Prussian-blue pigment that forms the unmistakable background of these works.

Atkins’s album British Algae (1843–1853), as well as Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853), made with her friend Anne Dixon, are works of extraordinary rarity. Here they are reproduced in full for the first time, showing that Atkins mastered multiple disciplines: while cyanotype enabled her to meet the challenges of accurate representation, the graceful outlines of the specimens against the intense blue background give the images a timeless aesthetic appeal.

For this edition, cyanotypes from various sources were carefully assembled in order to reproduce Atkins’s progressive works in full. They are drawn largely from copies held by the New York Public Library and the J. Paul Getty Museum. In his introductory essays, Peter Walther places the more than 550 cyanotypes in scientific and art-historical context, honoring the groundbreaking contributions of a true pioneer.