Welcome, everyone, to this online tool book. The title of the talk is Anna Atkins' Botanical Illustration and Photographic Innovation.
The event is a collaboration between Photo Oxford Clitic to Oxford Festival and towards the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
Now we'd like to say thank you tutorage, for hosting this event tonight and for making everything possible and for sharing sleights.
So we see some images. My name is Enough, which I'm the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Maritime Museum, University of Oxford.
And I'm also a big fan of photography and a researcher of photography.
I did my page on Japanese photography and I've published a on well, mainly Japanese photography.
And yes, I'm very excited. That's tonight I'm joined by Professor Jeffrey Betsen, who knows much more about photography than me.
And we want this to be a really fun, relaxed talk tonight. So please get yourself a drink.
Have a nice little Campari here and just relax and please ask us questions.
So there will be there's a little chat box. And so you can comment and ask us questions that we will then be able to answer at the end.
I'm going to say a few words about Jeff, who you can already see, I think, on the screen.
Jeff is the head of auto history at the University of Oxford, and he's also a fellow of Trinity College.
And his research has really focussed on photography, on photography in a very diverse way.
I'm just going to mention a few main publications, for example, Burning with Desire,
The Conception of Photography from 1997, each wild idea writing, photography, history from 2001 emanations.
The Art of the camera. This photograph from 2016.
I think this might actually also be interesting for tonight's talk and apparitions, photography and dissemination from two thousand eighteen.
And Jeff, like me, has also curated quite many shows in his case, ranging from Australia and New Zealand to Japan to the Netherlands and Germany.
So welcome, Geoff. Thank you, Lena. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for the introduction. So just to kind of give you a brief idea how you know how the event is organised tonight,
I'm going to first give you kind of very brief introduction about you to Oxford,
about the festival, the theme of the festival, and also about an Atkins.
And this will be accompanied by slides. So you can see so you can see some images.
And then following this, I'm going to ask what is going to be different?
A conversation, but maybe asking me, Jeff, various questions about Atkins work.
And yet, as I mentioned at the beginning, please ask us questions. So at the end, we can come back to your questions.
Yes. Could I please get the first slice? You see, this is our kind of injury slide.
Again, botanical illustration and photographic innovation. Could I see the next slide?
These. Yes. So, of course, this is about photography and we would like to think many people who have made it possible for us to show images tonight,
different institutions that hold I atkins' images.
So thank you very much. The next slide, please.
So this is just to give you a kind of idea of what the photo ID festival is about this year.
So the theme of this year's festival is women and Photography.
And I happen to be a trustee of Photo Oxford. And I'm very excited about this theme.
One of the reasons why I wanted to focus on women and photography this year is that
it is exactly 100 years ago that the first woman graduated from Oxford University.
So this was in 1920, in October.
And so we thought it's really kind of fitting to to celebrate that by focussing on women and photography and theme women.
And photography does not only mean women photographers, but it also relates to women in front of the camera,
relates to women who work with photography as curators. Women who collect photography.
So, you know, really women and photography in the widest possible sentence.
And here we see a photograph by Helen Must Separate, which is one exhibition that was on during the first festival at the Western Library in Oxford.
Of course, unfortunately, during the pandemic, the exhibition is closed at the moment.
Next slide, please.
But we have obviously knowing about kov it the when we at the beginning of the year when we were thinking about what to do with the festival.
We thought about various alternative ways of presenting photography.
And then you can see two interviews that I did for the for the home page, basically, for example, one with Canadia PARCA,
contemporary artists who I think is actually quite interesting also in relation to Atkins' Photography and Tokyo to Wandel,
whose work would have been shown in a big exhibition at the Ashmolean this summer, an exhibition called Tokyo Art and Photography, which we had to.
Postponed, which is hopefully going to happen next summer. So, yeah, various online events, you can see their home page in their slide.
I hope so. Please cheque out the home page. There's a lot of content there.
Next slide, please. And the other way of sharing photography, if I have to close experience, is, of course, outside.
So we decided to have a few outside installations. So if you're an Oxford on the home page, you can see that there is a map which you can download.
And with basic on your phone could walk around town and to see where they are different
to outdoor installations of photography ranging from Italian to young Italian.
London based photographer Severo See to next slide, please.
And Atkins', whose walk is presented also outside at Trinity College.
And Jeff made a selection of beautiful and Atkins' photographs that are shown outside.
I think there is a thatt slide showing some outdoor installations.
Yeah, we're really what we really likes about this is, you know, kind of people who might have never,
ever heard of Anna Atkins' just come across a walk by just looking through occiput it and suddenly
seeing an installation and then might be curious and want to find out more about her work.
Next slide, please. So I'm as I said, I'm not really an expert of early photography.
I do 20th century photography most of the time.
And so kind of you know, I wanted to see how atkins' photography is now perceived today by people who don't know anything about photography.
And so I basically just Googled us and it was kind of interesting to see that all these products came up.
So there are all these and Atkins' prints that you can buy, of course, but they're also,
you know, table cloths and puzzles and there is an atkins' wallpaper even.
And I thought it's quite amazing that a woman who's a photographer who's seen as make maybe even the first woman photographer is definitely one of
the very early photographers that her work is still so fashionable and that it still works today that that they even wallpaper with her goatees.
But yeah, who was an Atkins next slide? These napkins was born in seventeen ninety nine in Kent.
Her father, John Jauch children was a botanist and chemist, zoologist.
Her mother passed away when she was very young just a year later.
And she had a quite close relationship with her father.
And considering the fact that she was a woman and considering, you know, at the time she actually received quite a scientific education,
she'd collected plants and dried them, creating these kind of karriem albums.
I recently actually found some in our basement when we were going through when my grandmother
passed away and we found all these albums by my grandfather and great grandfather.
So I think, you know, many of you probably also know this this wonderful tradition of barriers.
So she she holds a collective breath, plants and dried them.
And I researched them and was then also elected a member of the London Botanical Society in eighteen hundred thirty nine.
So that was kind of, you know, the botanical interest was already there.
She married John Peli Atkins. And so that's where the name Atkins' then comes from.
Who is a businessman and a proponent of railways. She didn't have any children.
And maybe we can go to the next slides. We can see some of her wax.
And so, John, John, George, Children's father, and John Atkins, the husband,
they were both friends with William Henry Fox Talbert's we're senior important pioneer of photography.
And and Adkins was also friends with John Herschel,
who is also an experiment photographer and astronomer who invented the blueprint in eighteen hundred forty two.
And we're going to hear more about the technological side of things in a minute.
And so basically, one of the very important works by Anne Adkins is, you know, this very early photobook that was first published.
It was published between eighteen hundred forty three and eighteen hundred fifty fifty three and different kind of components.
But the work that we see here on the screen is one of those really early wax
dutchie that created it in the early 1940s with this new innovative technique.
You just have a look at a few more images for now. So these have Oggy.
It's a whole book only about LGT, and it's just fascinating how beautiful these Palicki look in her work.
And the reason why she originally created this these these works, these images was that there was already a book about.
These algae, Emmanual. It's called manual to the British Algae from eighteen hundred and forty one by William Henry Harvey.
And that one didn't have any illustration. It didn't have any photographs. And so she created these photographs in a way to complement the manual.
She continued to create more of these wonderful cyanotype prints.
I think overall it must have been over a thousand that she created these artworks that we now see that she created together with her friend and Dixon.
And it's actually quite interesting if you look at the work, how it develops kind of gets more abstract,
even it gets even more creative and more kind of decorative.
And yes, I would like to ask Jack some questions about it, about these blacks.
Presley, maybe, you know, just the kind of personal context.
Jack, how did you first encounter and Atkins photography and how did you do you remember how you how you first encountered her photographs?
I do remember because like most people, I think I first encountered Atkins' work in the form of this book,
which came out in nineteen eighty five, authored by the eminent American scholar Larry Sharf and published by Aperture in New York.
Beautifully illustrated.
I'll just show you the nice thing about genotypes is that they reproduce very nicely because they're such stock blue and white images.
So until about mid 1980s and Atkins' had been more or less forgotten and Larry had
encountered her work and did a fair amount of research and presented this book on it.
This was my first introduction to them. So I first saw them in the form of reproductions in this book before I'd ever seen an actual print.
I should just mention that just last year, Larry has issued a revised and much expanded version of that book.
So the one I showed first is now apparently a rare and valuable item where this one is still available in print.
So if people are have an interest in learning more about icons, Larry is the source of all knowledge.
And this is a very beautiful book. It was only recently just come out. So, yeah, that's how I first encountered her work.
I know, though, since then I have seen her work because many of the world's pre-eminent museums
and certainly those that collect photography have collected work by ACoNs.
I'll just add something to what you said before. According to Larry,
there is actually at least six thousand sinor touched by Atkins' of British ALGY plus several hundred others of various other things.
So there's actually a lot of Atkins' prints out there in the museum and even in the market.
Maybe we can kind of talk a little bit more about, you know, this kind of first book,
the photographs of British Algate Cyanotype Impression's, which is often considered to be the first photo back.
How, you know, how were these works actually created technically?
So I already mentioned it was a cyanotype photographic process was developed by by John HaShalom.
Eighteen hundred forty two. It was a completely really new technology then.
At the time when she used it, how did how did you actually create these flags?
As you said before, Lina Herschel was a friend of John Children and therefore also of Anna ACoNs.
And when he published his discovery of Cyanotype, he sent John children a copy.
And so Anakin said Direct had direct access, if you like, to all the formulae and chemicals that were necessary.
And she was a very industrious person.
So she immediately imagined this particular function for this new invention and decided she would create the series of albums.
So what it involved was some relatively available chemistry.
And certainly if you were an expert chemist, as her father was, and presumably Anna herself also was,
you mixed Ferrick ammonium nitrate and potassium, very, very cyanide to make an iron salt that would sensitive to light.
So you would take an ordinary piece of writing paper, you would brush this chemistry onto the paper and let it dry in the dark.
And then when you ready to expose it to light, you would take it out of the dark, put it in sunlight,
literally put in this case a specimen of dried algae on top of the piece of paper exposed to light for between maybe five to 15 minutes,
depending on the degree of sunshine that was available.
And the image, as you can see, a wide impression on a blue background would gradually begin to appear.
And then when you based on actually obviously unexperienced, realised that the full impression had been made,
you would take the specimen off the paper and then wash the piece of paper in clean water.
And that then washed out the light sensitive salts and you had a permanent white on blue impression of the plant specimen in your hand.
And as you can see, they've lasted from 1843 until now and they still look, most of them almost as fresh as the day that she made them.
It's amazing. I'm sorry. If we think about the purpose of these, like so they were originally made for, you know,
there's a kind of botanical scientific purpose to record this specimen and record them as accurately as possible.
And of course, there were shown in the correct size because they were based on dried algae and striped plants.
And they're presented together with their Latin name just the way that, you know, you which present plants in these herbarium orphans at the time.
Could you talk a bit about this botanical interest and the context that these images were first created?
Yeah, Atkins' was already familiar with the mechanics, if you like, of scientific illustration.
She had helped her father illustrate a book devoted to the genera of shells.
And she had done the drawings on which engravings were based. So before Atkins' and even after Ekins, to some degree,
the way that scientific illustration occurred was somebody would make a drawing of
a specimen and that drawing would have been translated into an engraved plate.
And then you would make income paper impressions from that great play.
That, of course, was a rather laborious means of illustrating scientific texts and also allowed a brought into the mechanism,
if you like, the potential imperfection of the human hand and the human eye.
So what Atkins' wanted to do is replace this imperfection with a means of making impressions or images of algae
where the algae got to make their own drawing and the imperfection of the human hand was taken out of the equation.
So what she would do was literally she had this extraordinary collection of British algae,
some of which she collected herself and some of which had been sent to her by friends and colleagues.
She would then take each specimen and literally place it on the page.
As you said, one of the striking things about these images is that they are one to one copy of the original specimen,
because The Matrix, if you like, is literally the piece of seaweed or algae itself.
She then also used a handwritten Latin label that she placed on each page.
And that's been written on a piece of paper which has then been oiled so that the paper is made transparent.
Then she would put that on the paper as well. And then over the specimen. And this label,
she would put a sheet of glass and all of it would be then screwed down into a wooden frame and then they would be left out in the
sunlight so that the glass in the frame within flatten the specimen down onto the paper and create a sharpened impression as possible.
And then what happens is that the specimen prevents light reaching the light sensitive eye and salt in the paper and thus leaves a wide impression.
And the rest of the paper goes blue. And so we get these kind of reverse tone impressions of all the details of the plant.
And as we've been looking through the examples,
you will have seen how on occasions she's folded part of the seaweed or algae over itself in order to make it fit the page.
So there's a certain amount of creativity involved, if you like, in arranging the specimen on the page.
Usually the specimen was placed directly in the centre so that there's a sense of the logic of symmetry, if you like,
involved in the way in which the specimen itself was placed on the page or in this case, across the diagonal.
So that all as much of the specimen as possible could actually be included in in the in the plate that represents it, of course.
When like when the when the specimen is somewhat transparent, light can go through it.
And so we get some sort of variations that tells us something about the thickness and transparency, relative transparency of each specimen as well.
If you are the little things about it that are worth noting, books at this period were usually issued in parts.
So as you mentioned, the first part was issued in October of 1843 with eight plates.
And then this. Each of those Fazekas, as they were called, would then be hand sewn together in a sort of paper wrapper.
And then that would be sent out to her friends and to botanical colleagues, both in England and possibly around the world.
And so probably she would have used her servants to help her do this, because what we're talking about is an awful lot of manual labour.
So one of the interesting things about these kinds of albums is that on the one hand,
we have this industrial automatic process of making images and on the other hand,
we have a lot of hand labour and manual creativity that's involved in the making of them.
In the example you have up here, which is quite an interesting one,
you can see that how she would have literally placed the specimen on the piece of paper and then lifted it off,
flipped it over onto another piece of paper. And we get the same specimen, but now in a different arrangement on the other piece of paper.
So we have to imagine. Her and her servants sitting there or standing there,
clipping these pieces of algae from page paper to paper to make multiple copies of the same specimen.
It's reminded that what this project is about is providing accurate data, accurate scientific information.
So it didn't matter that each image didn't look exactly the same.
What mattered was that the same information was imparted in every version of the specimen that was represented in the album.
And this, she imagined,
would make scientific comparison so that all colleagues will be looking at the same image in the same representation of the same specimen,
wherever they were. And this would allow scientific conversation and debate about these specimens much more accurate and much easier.
What else would you ask? That's interesting because that already leads kind of to the next question.
You know, you just mentioned that the scientific relevance and that you can compare the different specimen and but at the same time,
of course, we also already use the words creativity and could actually arrangement and composition.
So what is this relationship between science and art in this book, which I find really fascinating?
How would you describe the relationship between science and art?
And I think one of the things we have to remember about all of these people from this period of
Herschel to all but children Atkins' was that they imagined themselves to be natural philosophers.
And under that rubric, almost all knowledge rested so that you studied science.
But for example, both children and Atkins' also wrote poems,
Tolbert wrote published poetry and also drew and also invented Electric Motor and also was involved with the translation of cuneiform.
These were kind of omnivorous intellectuals. And so the division that we now have between science and art would not have been normal for them.
And so, of course, there was always an aesthetic element to what they did.
Good scientific illustration is about conveying data information as accurately as possible, but also in as pleasing a manner as possible.
So certainly she would have had some consideration for the look of the prints.
And as we can see, the symmetry of them, the way the label always sits in a particular place on the paper.
She obviously was imagining how people might be leafing through this album and what kind of pleasures they would get from it,
both intellectual and aesthetic. I think equally. And at the moment on screen, we see a photograph of Cyanotype from a late latex album.
It's it's one of the books that she puts together together with MDX and the British and foreign flowering plants.
How do you see the kind of development and in the work? Is it changing?
So if I look at them, it looks to me as if they become a little bit more, you know, even more kind of free, even more liberal.
She kind of gets even more experimental. Later on, then at the beginning, I think that's true.
She produced 12 festivals of the British algae algae publication over 10 years that her father, to whom she was very close, died in 1852.
So she Borland's took a year off to wind up his estate and to produce a memorial book devoted to him and her close friend.
And Dickson helped her in that endeavour.
And it's thought that and might well have helped Anna with the last farcical of the British algae publication,
but that they then went on to produce various other albums,
including this one to better to British and foreign flowering plants and other ones devoted to ferns,
and then some that included things like feathers and other kinds of things.
And with these other specimens like this rather extraordinary example, you can see them being far more creative.
In other words, the constraints of science seem to have been put aside,
and now they're more interested in the decorative possibilities of how these types of photographs might be might be created and enjoyed.
We don't really need the slides anymore now.
And perhaps you can talk a little bit more about photography at the time in general and kind of context of photography,
because, of course, we're talking about the very early stages of photography.
And maybe you can you know, for some people who are not so familiar with this context, you could tell a bit more about,
you know, maybe also some other people that we've already mentioned, like Talbert's and Cashel.
And now photography has an interesting sort of origin story in that at least two people claimed to have invented photography.
A Frenchman named Louis to get a professional painter and entrepreneur announced his invention
of a metal based photography process that he immodestly called after himself the daguerreotype.
And he announced it in the first week of January of 1839 in Paris.
And then this gentleman, scholar named William Henry Fox Tolbert,
heard of this announcement and suddenly realised that his own experiments of six
years before he'd had similarly explore experimented with the photographic process.
But he never thought he'd quite resolved it enough to be for it to be worthy of a public announcement.
So harassed by his mother, who was very annoyed that he hadn't got in there before the Frenchman,
he hurriedly made a similar announcement and presented some of his work, and he'd invented a process that he called photogenic drawing.
And this is where he soaked writing paper in a light sensitive chemist, a chemistry,
and then exposed the specimen to life on a piece of paper, much as Atkins' did a few years later with the cyanotype process.
So in his case, you could see the image develop out on the paper in front of you.
And then he added more salt and that delayed.
It didn't exactly fix, but it at least temporarily delayed the development process and had allowed an image to be seen and to be recorded permanently.
So this is the, if you like, double origin point of photography's introduction into modern culture, the daguerreotype,
which gave this very sharp and clear image we quickly developed into the primary commercial form of photography.
And if you wanted a photographic portrait made, you would normally go to a professional daguerreotypes studio.
The first of these opened in London in March of 1841, and by the end of that year there were perhaps a dozen professional studios operating
throughout Britain and similar studios opened up in most other countries around the world.
This process, because it involves soaking chemicals directly into writing paper, which in the early 19th century was a rather fibrous paper.
The image tended to be blurred and less clear. And the exposure times that his process were quite long compared to the degree of time.
So it was only a little later, a year or two later, when he invented his second process that he called teletype,
which involve making a negative and then printing positives from it, that the exposure times came down to a level where portraiture became possible.
But even then, paper-based processes like the ones that Talbot invented tended to be used by gentlemen and gentlewomen,
amateurs rather than by professionals.
So the daguerreotype dominated the professional market for photography up until and through the mid eighteen fifties that paper-based
photography tended to be used by people have told its own class members of the landed gentry people in the world science course,
scientists who were interested in botany founded of particular interest. And that's the link really with the Atkins'.
She's of more or less the same class as Tolbert. She moves in the same circles.
They're involved in the same scientific societies, and they are sharing their various experiments.
So how influential was photobook? Did it have an impact at the time on other books and on photography in general?
It doesn't seem to have had a big influence on others.
She certainly shared, for example, she sent a farcical of her book to Torbert and he in turn sent part of his pensive nature,
his first photographic book to her. And there is occasional references to her work through the 19th century.
But it, for example, doesn't seem to have spawned a lot of copies, similar kinds of books by others.
There are there are other examples of cyanotype publications.
An American named Bertha Jack, for example, produced one, but not until the turn of the 20th century.
So there isn't an immediate, for example, what one might imagine.
Oh, my God, look at this amazing way of making botanical books. And everybody starts doing it.
That actually doesn't occur. There were some limitations to what Atkins' was doing.
And professional botanists continue to use engravings rather than photographs as the illustration of choice.
Well, an excuse is often called the first woman photographer, although there are kind of debates.
What would you say? Well, I would say as an historian that we need to avoid claiming firsts.
It's a it's a kind of a it's a nice headline, but it usually can't be backed up with evidence.
There are probably earlier women who worked with photography.
For example, Talbot's wife, Constance, refers in letters to making photographs and so on.
But I think it'd be fair to say that Anna Atkins' is the first woman to produce a substantial body of
photographic work and certainly the first major publication entirely focussed on the making of photographs.
So she certainly deserves a. She does not think so, I'm sorry.
She certainly deserves a place of honour,
but it is interesting and maybe there's a book to be written about why it isn't until the mid 1980s that that honour was properly accorded to her.
Let's talk about the relevance of Anna Atkins black today.
So, I mean, I mentioned there is, you know, kind of merchandising products that you can find online and also mentioned calling pockets black.
And he's not which is not directly related to Anna Atkins necessarily, but more to tell.
But she actually went to Oxford and went through the archives and got inspired by the objects that were there.
But clearly. So they are artists today. You get still get inspiration from, you know, early photographic works.
So what what would you say today? How relevant is is the work, let's say in some ways and Adkins has never been more current.
Possibly. Possibly because of the advent of digital imaging.
A lot of photographic artists going back to handmade photographs, including cameral as handmade photographs.
And for them, Anna Atkins' is a kind of high point of early practise.
As I mentioned at the outset, one of the striking things about Atkins' work is that it still looks contemporary.
It has no periodicity, if you like. It looks like they've made yesterday the best preserved ones.
Certainly look as if they were made yesterday. So they seem and feel very current.
In fact, you might well say that there's more personally,
I think it's very hard for contemporary photographer to to outdo Atkins' in a way, you know, Campbell's photographs with Cyanotype.
She kind of she is the Everest and everybody else seems to be somewhat imitative.
But for example, I was very fortunate last year to be able to see a fabulous exhibition of Anna ACMS work at the New York Public Library.
It was like going into an aquarium with all these floating albums of these blueprints all around.
It was fantastic experience. And the New York Public Library organised a supplementary exhibition of contemporary artists working in a similar way.
And it's a reminder that indeed there are many artists inspired by people like Hopkins who are revisiting these sort
of early handmade photography techniques and trying to find ways to make photography still respond to the present.
I think Ekins is an inspiration for that. We actually already have a few questions that have come through,
so maybe I might kind of open up and encourage more people to ask questions and ask you.
One question that came, which is about camera based photography.
So is there any evidence that Atkins' also used a camera, a camera, or that you engage in lens based photography?
There is evidence total, but as I say, it was close to her father.
And when he announced his invention of photography, he first sent an account of that invention to the father and then some examples of his prints.
And we have letters and we know that Anna Atkins herself went out and bought a camera shortly after that.
So we can only presume, given the evidence we have of the curiosity and accomplishment,
that she also made camera photographs using Talbot's earliest processes.
However, so far, those have not been found. So we assume that she must have made some.
But we have yet to find any actual examples in the memoir that she prepared for her father.
It includes poems about colour type portraits. So we also presume that perhaps they made portraits of each other at some point.
Certainly. Her father went and had a professional colour type portrait made of himself in London.
So, you know, by the time by 1850, I would have been 52 when he died.
Photography had thoroughly infiltrated modern culture.
And there are studios and professional photographers and everybody was everybody there means having portraits of made of themselves.
So the short answer is yes, very likely. And Atkins' made camera based photographs.
But we don't have any actual examples, unfortunately. Interesting.
Yeah, there is a there's a question about the algae and this specimen in the photo box.
Are there any extinct species that must have extra value?
I assume so. But I don't I mean, I don't I don't know off the top of my head.
But coming back to your earlier question about what Atkins' might mean today,
there have been recent articles talking about ACoNs project because a kind of model for eco
criticism that that it's perfectly possible if I knew more about the history of botany,
that there are specimens in her albums that are now rare or difficult to find or even extinct.
And certainly these kinds of Victorian depositories are becoming increasingly
interesting because precisely they offer us a kind of ecology of the eighteen,
thirties and forties that we may not otherwise have access to today.
Fascinating. Coming back to the question about the kind of first photobook.
So of course, I talbott's book, The Pedestal If Nature is often seen as the first photobook, but Atkins' Block was Leah.
Is that a question? But it's a state of the art file.
What's just. It's a bit like first, it all depends on how you define book and first and things like that there.
As soon as photography was invented,
Tolbert imagined its facility for publication and tried to promote the idea amongst friends that photography might be a great way,
for example, for poets to publish their manuscripts without having to go to a publisher or a printer.
So he certainly had ideas of his own about the ways in which his paper-based photography might facilitate publication.
He published a book called The Pencil of Nature between 1844 and 1846.
And so he began that project maybe about a year after Atkins' began Heard's.
So I think she properly should be honoured as the first photographic book.
On the other hand, you might say what's interesting about the Pencil of Nature is that it was a book about photography, not just of photographs.
So it was a selection of his own work with commentaries by Todd,
but about the role that photography might play in different kinds of image making practises.
So I think, you know, they were friends and colleagues and I think they should be honoured equally.
And the two books are an interesting complement to each other. They showed two different ways in which photography could be used to aid publications.
Well, if you think about it and the context of what kind of social obstacles might
Afghans have had for being considered an innovative or a serious photographer,
wish you were recognised in her day.
Well, as I say, she was known in this small circle and she certainly was a respected contributor to botanical science in those circles.
But like most women of that period, there were obviously serious constraints to her, for example,
reaching the imminence of her father, who was a member of a number of societies and so on.
She also, by the way, was a member of, for example, the Royal Botanical Society and things like that.
It's not as if she was entirely excluded, but there's no doubt that her work has not reached the eminence.
It did not reach the eminence during her lifetime and during the 19th century that looking back, we feel it ought to have.
On the other hand, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron, who begins photographing in the 18th 60s,
certainly was an eminent photographer in her time and almost ever since was recognised around the world as being a pre-eminent photographer.
So, you know, there needs to be some analysis of why exactly Atkins' project,
for example, didn't have the impact that Cameron's career had just 20 years later.
And Cameron's wife was also quiet very, very early on by that, by the BNA.
It was and she exhibited all around the world. She had an exhibition in Australia in 1974.
You couldn't imagine being further away from the centre of the empire than that.
So she was certainly a very ambitious photographer and a professional photographer, if you like.
Atkins', I think was a quieter personality and circulated her work in a much smaller circle of colleagues for her.
I think the project was primarily science. And whereas Cameron definitely had a had a flair for self promotion and Atkins' was more
content with contributing to the small world of botanical science in which she found herself.
I mean, the similarity would be, though, that they started quite late.
Both of them didn't date and were both in their 40s when they first kind of picked up photography.
Yeah, yeah. I think Cameron was even older than that. Yeah. No, they both started relatively late.
Of course, in the case of Atkins', photography was only invented a couple of years before she took it up and decided to make this series of albums.
So she was really an innovator.
I mean, we tend to forget that people looking at these albums at the time would have seen them as an incredible modern innovation.
I mean, it's almost industrial that you can put something on a piece of paper and have it leave its own impression behind.
The use of chemistry, for example, as your medium.
All of these things were new and modern innovations and made her project is entirely a modernist one.
There is a question about, you know, the later albums where the plants come from basically all over the world.
There were some you know, we saw one from Norway, for example. So how did you actually get hold of all these plants?
Did you travel or herself? Not not as far as I know.
But there's a few things to be known about her. Of course, we're talking about a relatively wealthy woman.
Her husband, John Atkins', and his family had plantations in Jamaica.
At one point, owning slaves to work those plantations. So this is where the wealth of the family came from.
And this, of course, allowed her to work independently at the need to actually make money from her labours.
And of course, it allowed her to have servants in her own labour force, if you like, to help produce these books.
So but she is a you know, she's a member of this community of fellow botanists.
And one of the things that these communities and the societies engineer is the exchange of specimens.
So she would have gathered up British examples and sent them off to botanical friends around the world.
And equally, she would have collected or had sent to her specimens from around the world.
And one of the interesting things about the later albums is precisely that they, in effect, encompass the entirety of the British Empire.
So they're exempt their firms from Jamaica. There's burns from New Zealand and from Australia and from all over the place.
And so she was obviously concerned to give us give give our viewers a kind of global view of,
for example, the species, the firm's species that she was documenting. So that's something that also, I think we need to take into account.
We imagine that globalism is a contemporary phenomenon, but by the mid 19th century,
the British Empire has made somebody like ACoNs feel like she is at the centre of the globe.
And in many ways she was. And so all the specimens come into the centre and then she documents them in her albums.
There is a question about the introduction of paper photography.
Could you talk a bit more about that? And also the relationship to kind of botanical illustration?
Well, like Atkins' told, it was a world famous botanist.
And so one of the first functions that he imagined for his new invention of photogenic drawing was that it could
allow him back with Atkins' to make accurate botanical impressions without the intervention of the human hand.
So amongst the very first images he made with his new process were botanical contact prints, much like Atkins'.
But using different light sensitive chemistry. And he quickly sent specimens, as she did to botanists.
For example, there's an album that was put together initially.
Tolbert sent these specimens to a botanical colleague in Italy.
So, you know, again, he's part of this sort of international network of like minded people.
And he was trying to persuade them that his new invention of photography was going to be very useful, as Atkins' did in her time.
Tolbert is an interesting fellow. So he's a member, a member of the landed gentry.
He lived at Laycock a few hours outside of London. And he, you know, his money came from renting his estates to two people who worked his land.
So he was relatively wealthy, but not being fabulously wealthy, but relatively wealthy man.
In other words, he's not driven by financial need. And so although with his second invention, the Calor type, he took out a patent,
which meant that to use it, you had to pay him a licence and get his permission. He wasn't a very good businessman.
He attempted to encourage others to set up commercial studios that would use paper for his paper photography process,
and a number of studios attempted it. But all of them eventually fell into financial trouble and went bankrupt.
So it wasn't until the eighteen fifties and the invention of glass negatives that paper-based
photography because then they would make paper prints from these glass negatives.
The paper based photography superseded the daguerreotype and became the premier commercial photography.
On the other hand, gentlemen, amateurs like Torbert himself found paper photography to be very useful,
and they could make photographs of the trees and the landscapes on their estates and so on.
They could put together indeed botanical albums of their own specimens and show them to friends and things like that.
And over in France, where they basically ignored towboats, patent rights,
they experimented with paper based photography and made it a more commercially viable proposition.
And paper based photographs began to be made, for example, by French travellers to Egypt and places like this.
So outside of Britain, paper-Based photography had a better at a stronger commercial presence than it did inside Britain.
And retrospectively, we might well say that Talbert's defence of his patent rights somewhat stymied innovation for the process in Britain.
Whereas in other countries where that patent didn't quite hold, some innovation was impossible and the process became far more popular.
Interesting. We already had a bit about, you know, kind of the network that Anna Atkins had and the people that she was engaging with.
And there is a question about other early female photographers.
And if she had only contact with them, for example, Elizabeth stuck there, Wilkinson was mentioned.
I don't think it was. I have not heard of Elizabeth Wilkinson. We do know that, as I say, women of, say, Atkins' class did take up Talbert's process.
And we have various examples of women making similar botanical specimens, usually using towboats process rather than cyanotype.
There are also examples of women running professional daguerreotypes, studios usually not invariably,
but usually they've inherited them from a husband who's died or something like that.
But they were professional women photographers working in the eighteen forties and fifties.
So women did have a presence in the photography world. Of course, it's a relatively small presence relative to the number of men working in it.
But it's like many aspects of the 19th century, we find innovative and determined women finding a place for themselves within that world.
One thing about photography was it was a new industry, like a kind of Start-Up new tech industry for the time,
and perhaps that allowed women to take it up in ways that more traditional industries still were denied to them.
I should say also, Lane, that women were very enthusiastic patrons of photography.
So, you know, there are a small number of women photographers from this early period, the eighteen forties, but there were far more women customers.
So some of the first customers for daguerreotypes studios in London, for example, were women.
Quaker women in particular, for reasons that I'm not quite sure of.
But we have a lot ability to go to types of Quaker women, for example.
So, yeah, women certainly embraced the possibilities of photography and sometimes made photographs themselves as well.
Just looking at a few other questions that have come through quite many or all kinds of different questions.
Can you talk more about the shift in Atkins? Janet Seanna types becoming associated more with photographic objects rather than scientific evidence.
Is this to do with where or how her work was collected or reproduced?
Yes, that's a lot to do with how photography is seen these days.
I mean, these kind of categorisations, right? I mean, as I say, there's a shift in Atkins' work around 1852 with the death of her father.
She finishes up the British ALGY project and then with Anne Dixon, she begins to make other kinds of albums.
But whereas with the other projects she published,
basically 12 festivals that were she imagined would be bound together by the people who receive them over this 10 years,
that they would then be bound together into a single sort of compendium.
These other after 1852 or so, these other albums were more for personal pleasure.
That is, they were not made like not quote unquote, mass produced.
We think maybe they were like 30 complete sets of the British algy made Rosies other albums or more like single objects made up of many plates,
but single in a molik, singular objects that were possibly made for themselves or as gifts to close friends.
So in other words, they weren't widely distributed. And in that sense, we're not particularly widely known either.
We have another question about how. Watch how she saw herself.
I think we talked about this a little bit, but did she consider herself an ecologist or an artist or is that a modern distinction?
I think that probably is a modern distinction.
And the sad thing is we actually have relatively little evidence of what Atkins' thought about this or most other topics.
We have quite a lot.
We know quite a lot about what she thought about her father because she lovingly produced this memoir that took a year to put together,
including poems and memories of her father and all of this kind of thing.
We have relatively little written by Atkins' about her project.
We mostly glean it from letters often written by her father, who refers to what his daughter is up to.
So Atkins' is one of those figures who remains somewhat enigmatic in terms of the wider
knowledge of her personality or her own ideas or about life other than this album.
There was also an earlier question about designers and manufacturers. I mean, we already know if they took inspiration from from high genotypes.
Particularly thinking about wallpaper or textiles, etc., that we saw at the very beginning that, you know,
today I using motifs and the colour, actually, I mean, this blue colour is, of course, something that must have been quite spectacular.
Also at the time, generically, there were any inspiration for designers or manufacturers.
As I say at the time, we have little evidence that Atkins' albums had an impact outside of the small botanical circle in which they circulated.
However, by the late 19th and early 20th century, we do find other photographers photographing details of nature of plants,
specifically for the use, for example, of designers, let's say, during the ongoing movement.
So we find people making photographic albums of botanical specimens precisely so that designers
could copy details and incorporate them into industrial design and other kinds of work,
including wallpaper design and so on. But it's only after the 1980s that Anna Atkins' work has any kind of public profile like that.
What you showed in the opening up to our talk. That's a very contemporary phenomenon.
I think that's about it in terms of questions that have come through.
Is there anything else that you would like to say about her work?
Only that I think Larry's done a fantastic job of giving us as much information as possible about Atkins'.
But there's still an awful lot to say about it.
She deserves detailed analysis of anybody's listening who would like a project, for example, the later albums.
There's not a huge amount written about them. I mean, we talk about them as possible sort of studies of early Victorian ecology.
But it would be wonderful to have people not only from art history, but, for example,
from the sciences and bought me looking at them and giving us some more information about what their significance might be.
So I think Larry has opened the door to the study of Atkins'.
But there's an awful lot more to do. And I hope over time we'll know a lot more about her.
And we'll have a better understanding of what the significance really is.
Do you think there is any more work to be discovered that might be hiding somewhere?
Yes. In fact, in that exhibition in New York,
they discovered an album that had been mis catalogued in a huge album of the work that had been mis catalogued in a library somewhere,
and that was discovered by almost by chance. So we're pretty confident that there's quite a lot more of atkins' work out there.
Possibly. Who knows? Deposited in libraries, you know, in the botanical section.
And people don't realise that as as photographs. They're quite important as well.
So, yeah, I think there's certainly more work to be found.
But I would say in general that the early history of photography is still a field that is understudied.
And there's just a lot of work in general out there to be not only found, but to be analysed and interpreted and appreciated.
A new. Yeah, I think that's a very good way to end as well.
And coming back to the whole theme of women and photography, it just shows that,
you know, today there are so many photographers who happen to be women and are active.
But actually, there were quite many women active as photographers at the very beginning of photography as well.
And it would be great to find out more about them and to maybe rediscover some of their work and appreciate it properly.
Yes, I think almost certainly there are more women to be discovered and fantastic work waiting for somebody to do
the proper analysis of the whole field is just waiting for scholars to dig into it and make new discoveries.
Well, thank you, Jeff, so much for joining me tonight. And thank you again tutorage for organising this event.
And for those of you who are in oxfords to play,
toxoid festival is still on for another few days so you can wander around the city and discover some work there.
And otherwise, please visit the home page. And thank you very much for joining us tonight.
And thank you also for all the nice questions. By.