Photography History #12 – Anna Atkins: when light drew the sea
A pale, irregular shape sits on a deep blue book page. It could pass for a botanical drawing at first: thin, uneven edges and delicate shifts of tone inside. Near the bottom someone has written a Latin name, Ulva lactuca. Look more closely. The light form is the impression left by a real piece of seaweed.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art attributes the work to Anna Atkins and dates it to about 1853. No camera lens formed this image. Atkins placed the specimen against light-sensitive paper and exposed it to sunlight. The result is a photogram: a photographic image produced by direct contact.
The blue is not the seaweed's natural colour. It comes from the cyanotype process. This page is at once a botanical record, a trace made by light and a consciously arranged image.
What can we see in Ulva lactuca?
Ulva lactuca is a green seaweed, commonly called sea lettuce. The print does not report its natural colour in the sea. Instead, it records the outline of one particular specimen and the different amounts of light that reached the prepared paper. The nearly white portions and the paler blues come from those differences in exposure.
The specimen occupies only part of the wide blue field. That unoccupied space is important. From across a room we can read the pale form as one object; close to the page we notice its broken-looking edges and its uneven density. The shape belonged to the algae. The placement belonged to the person making the photograph.
At the bottom is a small handwritten name. It is a means of identification, not simply a decorative caption. Without it, a viewer might admire the image while being uncertain about its subject. With the name, the photograph belongs to a sequence of specimens that can be compared and studied.
A photograph without a camera
Sir John Herschel developed cyanotype in 1842. The process uses paper treated with light-sensitive iron compounds. After exposure and washing, the areas that received light become a characteristic deep blue. Areas shielded by the specimen stay much paler. Thinner or more translucent material may produce intermediate tones.
Atkins placed a piece of algae on the prepared surface and exposed it to daylight. The paper was then washed to produce a lasting image. No lens or camera shutter was required. Even so, this was precise photographic work: how the specimen touched the surface, the intensity of light and the handling of the paper all mattered.
A photogram has an unusually direct relationship to its subject. A physical object helps form the mark. Yet that mark is not a complete scientific description. Natural colour, three-dimensional thickness, the object's condition and its collecting place cannot all be reconstructed from the sheet alone.
A book built from photographic prints
Atkins began privately issuing Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843. Its parts were shared within a network of botanical acquaintances. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's Natural History Museum describe the project as the earliest book to be printed and illustrated using photographs.
This particular Ulva lactuca sheet has a later approximate date: the Met records it as circa 1853. The distinction matters. 1843 is the starting date of the book project, not the confirmed date of this individual print. The museum's accession number for the sheet is 2005.100.557 (142).
Atkins arranged the specimens, made the impressions by hand and wrote their scientific names. Producing a copy of the book therefore involved repeated, demanding work. Surviving volumes should not be assumed to be identical in the way copies of a mechanically printed modern book usually are.
Scientific evidence and visual choices
A botanical illustration needs to make a specimen identifiable. Its outline and visible detail matter. Care in spreading the material over the page was therefore part of the scientific task. A folded specimen might conceal exactly the edge someone needed to compare with another example.
Notice that the outline is not symmetrical. It comes from a particular piece of collected plant matter. Choosing the specimen, arranging it and leaving blue space around it were decisions. They make the image readable and give it a visual rhythm. The scientific purpose and the composition reinforce each other.
Naturalists already relied on drawings, engravings and detailed descriptions. Contact printing added a different kind of record: the specimen itself helped shape the light and dark areas on the page. That did not make the record automatic or infallible. It still needed identification, comparison and an understanding of the photographic process.
Who could take part in nineteenth-century science?
Atkins grew up around scientific work. Her father, John George Children, worked at the British Museum. The Natural History Museum explains how his connections helped her gain access to knowledge and scientific conversations that were not equally available to women working in professional science at the time.
Resources also shaped what could be made. The museum notes that part of her husband's family wealth was connected to plantations in Jamaica and to the history of British compensation paid to enslavers. This history cannot be read from the algae print itself. It belongs to the wider explanation of who had the time, equipment and means to undertake such a painstaking publication.
Historical accuracy includes those circumstances. Naming the maker and the date is essential; understanding how the project became possible offers another layer of context.
Evidence and interpretation
The Met's collection record establishes the author, title, approximate date, process and size of the original: 25.3 by 20 centimetres. The museum lists the work as public domain. These details are available for readers to check.
Calling the blue field calm, or the pale shape suspended in it, is a visual reading. Such language has value when it points to features visible on the sheet. It cannot tell us exactly what Atkins felt while producing this exposure, and no invented personal memory is needed to appreciate the image.
> The seaweed supplied the outline; light left the impression. Its placement on the page also decides how the viewer moves through the image.
Documentary value does not require the absence of decisions. It requires clarity about which features are material traces and which depend on presentation and later interpretation.
What can we learn from this page today?
When we look at digital photographs, we often assume colour belongs to the subject. Here the blue was produced by chemistry, not by the plant. The pale shape was not projected by a lens. It formed through contact and differing transmission of light. Knowing the process changes what we can reasonably infer from the resulting image.
In the previous episode, Roger Fenton's Crimean road (https://blog.banhalmi.art/en/post/roger-fenton-valley-shadow-death-1855-en) showed objects left in a landscape. Atkins's photograph is different: the object itself shaped the photographic trace. Both works invite us to distinguish what is visible from the explanation added around it.
Look again at the seaweed, its large field of blue and its handwritten label. Which details are contained in the photograph itself, and which become clear only through the collection record or the history of the process?
Sources and image rights
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Ulva lactuca (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/291638): Anna Atkins, ca. 1853, cyanotype, accession 2005.100.557 (142), Public Domain.
- The Met – Photographs of British Algae (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286656): history of the photographic book, 1843–1853.
- Natural History Museum, London (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/anna-atkins-cyanotypes-the-first-book-of-photographs.html): the botanical, technical and social context.
- New York Public Library (https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/visual-world/item/4105): the publication and surviving copies.
- Ashmolean Museum (https://ashmolean.web.ox.ac.uk/article/how-victorian-women-shaped-colour-technologies): the cyanotype process and visual qualities.
Planned image: Anna Atkins, Ulva lactuca, ca. 1853, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access / Public Domain. The underlying work is cleared for reuse, but importing its reproduction into Wix was blocked twice by safety checks. Do not publish without the original image.