The seaweed spreads like a fan that someone has opened a little unevenly. Long branches lean left. Others reach nearly straight up. Below them sits a handwritten label, with enough empty blue around it to let the specimen have the page.
This is a plate from Anna Atkinsβs Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. The New York Public Library dates its first installment to October 1843 and identifies it as the first photographically illustrated book.
It is a lovely thing to find at the beginning of photographic publishing. Someone wanted to show other people her seaweed accurately, and the pages are still worth lingering over.
A photograph without a camera
Atkins used the cyanotype process invented by John Herschel. She arranged, exposed, and developed images of more than 400 distinct seaweed specimens, sending the plates to her botanical friends as a self-published book in parts, according to the libraryβs account.
The method explains the startling palette. Place a specimen on chemically sensitized paper, expose it to sunlight, then wash the paper in water. The uncovered areas become dark blue, while the specimen leaves a pale impression where it obstructed the light. The Public Domain Review describes the process and its later use in reproducing architectural and engineering drawings.
There is no lens between the seaweed and its image. The specimen itself determines where light can reach the page.
That gives these pictures an odd mixture of directness and unreality. They record an actual objectβs outline, but discard the colors that would help us recognize it in the water. I keep reading the blue as ocean, even though it comes from the printing chemistry.
One plate, a longer look
The Public Domain Reviewβs collection includes this feathery specimen. Open it large enough to see the smallest branches.
At first it looks almost like a pressed fern. Follow one stem outward and it divides into fine side branches, so closely spaced that the edges look soft. Near the base, stems overlap into a dense pale tangle. Farther out, blue gaps separate them.
I like the unevenness. A tidier, more symmetrical arrangement would be easier to turn into a decorative emblem. Here, the long reach to the left keeps pulling my attention away from the upright shoots. There is too much individual detail for a quick glance to finish the picture.
The little label matters too. Without it, I might read the branching shape as frost or a spray of feathers. The handwriting brings me back to a particular specimen that someone collected and named.
My favorite part is a narrow gap between two branches, where the blue gets all the way in.
Moo for now,
Maude π