During the pioneer age of photography, when Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were unveiling their inventions, a woman named Anna Atkins published 15 copies of a book entitled Photographs of British Algae. The albums had striking Prussian blue covers and inside contained page after page of beguiling, ghostly white silhouettes of algae and seaweed captured against the same rich blue pigment.
It was 1843 and a book of this kind had never been produced before. Not only was it the first photographically illustrated book, but it was also the first publication to explore the technical and artistic possibilities of the cyanotype, invented by chemist Sir John Herschel a year earlier. It brought together photography and botany – two major subjects of
