Anna Atkins was the first person to publish photographic illustrations in a book. Some argue she was the first woman to even create a photograph. These cyanotypes capture flowers, plants and algae in the most intense detail. Every leaf, petal, vein and stalk intricately detailed through bright cyan and white. There’s something triumphant about them, these plants have been preserved in such a small book, yet those plants have lived for over a hundred years. Not drawings of them, but actual shadows that these plants cast on the paper have livedlonger than any plant should.
I find it comforting in a strange way, that plants looked the same in the nineteenth century as they do today. Poppies have the same rounded petals; the leaves of ferns have the same point.The plants I see when I’m walking my dog are the same plants Anna Atkins documented with her photographs. Fundamentally, we all see the same way.
I have always loved plants; I think it’s their familiarity. The way I look at a poppy is the same way Atkins looked at it when she made her cyanotypes. We are so far apart, yet so intertwined through the world around us.
Modernity is a strange thing, it has given us so much, but taken away so much too. We see ourselves – and the world around us – every single day through curated screens and unfiltered cameras. We look at the world in such a different way, what was new technology to Atkins is so familiar to us now, but somehow, we still see the same thing.
When I think about flowers now, after spending a year of my degree contemplating the modern condition of humanity through art, I find myself looking backwards. There’ssomething mythical about the sameness, the innate human desire to preserve and learn more about the world we live in is hypnotic. Nothing changes, yet we discover more every day.
I can’t help but think backwards when I think of love. These feelings, like these flowers, are things that have been felt, been seen, been held for centuries. Surely, love must have driven people to preserve flowers; pressing them between books, casting their shadow onto paper forever? In some strange way, our cameras do the same thing.
The human condition is its desire to preserve, to find some way to hold the things we love dear, to find some way to document how the flowers grew over a hundred years ago, and how they sit in my vase today. We want to preserve the objects we love, so that they live beyond us. There’s a great beauty to it, as flowers rot down into the dirt, we hold on to their shape, their shadow, their photograph, because we wish to preserve them.
I remember the strange sensation of pride I felt when I saw the house Anna Atkins was born in – in a town a few miles away from my house. I felt as though these objects, these plants, preserved for science were somehow rooted into my body. My connection to this preservation somehow rooted into my physical being. Like it’s part of my identity. But plants grow everywhere; their shadows look the same, their leaves the same shape. It is not just a part of me, but a part of how we all have a deep desire to hold the things we love, the things we see as signs of beauty, in our hands forever.