Anna Atkins - In depth Analysis

 

This cyanotype was created by an English photographer and botanist named Anna Atkins who was born on 16th March 1799 and died on 9th June 1871. She is well known as the first person to publish a book with photographic illustrations as well as the first woman to create a picture. She learned from a photographer named William Henry Fox Talbot about and how to use two of his photographic inventions; photogenic drawing and calotypes. Photogenic drawing is a technique that uses an object placed on light-sensitized paper and is exposed to the sun.

The cyantopye process was invented by Sir John Herschel (who was a friend of Anna's) in 1842. The following year, Anna Atkins produced her own cyanotype using seaweed and placing it on the cyanotype paper to be exposed by the sun for a number of minutes. In October 1843 she self-published in her book called Photographs of British Algae : Cyanotype impressions, which was her first published book. Although she is known to be the first person to publish a book with photographic illustrations, in June 1844 Fox Talbot's book: The Pencil of Nature was the first book illustrated with photographs to be commercially published. 

The cyanotype presented at the top of the page is my favourite cyanotype by Anna Atkins. This is because the great amount of detail of the different sections of the seaweed that we can sea. I think Anna Atkins carefully thought about the aesthetics of the putcome of her cyantope and specifically chose vegetation with a large amount of stems to make the cyanotype interesting and well detailed. 

My cyanotype experiments inspired by Anna Atkins:

 

These are my cyanotypes that I made using leaves. For the first one I used a piece of paper (with the chemicals on) to place plants on and leave out in the sun for exposure for 15 minutes. Evidently the cyanotype didn't come out that good as we are unable to see the detail and shapes of the plants. I think that this was due to the fact that the plants did not have direct contact with the paper. As a result of this, I did another experiment with a different material (cloth) and placed glass over the leaves during the  exposure time. This was very successful as you can clearly see the shape of the leaves.