Crafting and collecting cyanotypes: Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

Abstract

This essay reads Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853) as an example of Victorian imitative art by reading it through the lens of Victorian domestic handicraft. It does so in order to resituate Atkins's work within the history of scientific visualization and to contribute to the increasing complexity scholars of visual culture and of the scientific image have added to prevailing accounts of the rise of the “objective” scientific image in the nineteenth-century. Building on the work of historians of photography, art, science, and literature, it argues that her cyanotypes point toward an alternative history of scientific image as a form of craft and collection that resonates with recent calls in the study of the scientific image and scientific practices to move “beyond representation.”