In the autumn of 1843, a woman in Sevenoaks laid a sprig of dried algae onto paper she had brushed with a solution of iron salts, then carried the sheet into her garden to wait for the sun. When she washed the paper in water the white silhouette emerged against a deep, impossible blue — and Anna Atkins had made the first photographically illustrated page in publishing history.
Salt, Sunlight, and Specimen
The cyanotype process had been invented only the year before by Sir John Herschel. Atkins, a trained botanical illustrator and daughter of the Keeper of the British Museum, recognised immediately that it could solve a problem she had struggled with for years: how to reproduce the forms of seaweed accurately in print. Cyanotype required only a brush, a chemical bath, and the patience to wait for the English sun.
“The blue is not drawn in. It is the colour that remains when light has done its work upon the paper — the ground made visible by the absence of the specimen.”