This season, The New York Public Library is drawing from its collections—and ideas that continue to inspire artists today—to present two companion exhibitions celebrating the life and legacy of one of photography’s earliest pioneers.

Often considered the first female photographer, artist and botanist Anna Atkins published the first book using the newly discovered cyanotype process. Today, her bright blue images continue to resonate in the art world. Discover her work and the work she has influenced in these exhibitions on display at the Library’s 42nd Street building. Plus, check out an array of programs and other Library resources to learn more about Atkins and photography today.

EXHIBITIONS

Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins
October 19, 2018–February 17, 2019 | Wachenheim Gallery

Anna Atkins (1799–1871) came of age in Victorian England, a fertile environment for learning and discovery. Guided by her father, a prominent scientist, Atkins was inspired to take up photography, and in 1843 began making cyanotypes—a photographic process invented just the year before—in an effort to visualize and distribute information about her collection of seaweeds. With great daring, creativity, and technical skill, she produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be illustrated with photographs, and the first substantial application of photography to science. Ethereal, deeply hued, and astonishingly detailed, the resulting images led her and her friend Anne Dixon to expand their visual inquiry to flowering plants, feathers, and other subjects. This exhibition draws upon more than a decade of careful research and sets Atkins and her much-admired work in context, shedding new light on her productions and showcasing the distinctive beauty of the cyanotype process, which is still used by artists today.

Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works
September 28, 2018–January 6, 2019 | Rayner Special Collections Wing & Print Gallery

In 1843 Anna Atkins began producing Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be printed and illustrated using photography. Today, 175 years later, her landmark project—compelling in its fusion of science and art, its modernity, and its realization by a woman in an age marked by the feats of men—remains a touchstone for viewers and makers alike. This exhibition brings together a diversity of works by 19 contemporary artists whose respective practices attest to the wide reach and generative nature of Atkins’s continuing legacy.

PROGRAMS

Meet the Artist

Rayner Special Collections Wing & Print Gallery

On the occasion of Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, the Library has invited the following artists to engage with the public and speak about their work in the exhibition. Each hour-long event will take place at lunch time in front of the artist's work in the Rayner Special Collections Wing and Print Gallery.

Letha Wilson: Tuesday, October 15 | 12:30 PM
Meghann Riepenhoff: Friday, October 19 | 1:30 PM
Katherine Hubbard: Tuesday, November 6th | 12:30 PM
Erica Baum: Thursday, December 6th | 12:30 PM
Alison Rossiter: Wednesday, December 19th | 12:30 PM

Kind of Blue: Meghann Riepenhoff

Wednesday, October 17 | 6:30 PM
Schwarzman Building, Berger Forum

The contemporary photographer  traces the impacts on her work made by pioneering nineteenth-century photographer Anna Atkins. 

How We See: Photobooks by Women

Thursday, October 25 | 6:30 PM
Schwarzman Building, Celeste Auditorium
 
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of pioneering photographer Anna Atkins's first photobook, creatives Olga Yatskevich, Lesley Martin, and Daria Tuminas explore the world of avant-garde photobooks created by women.

The Library After Hours: Picture This

Friday, November 30 | 7 PM
Schwarzman Building, Astor Hall

Picture this: it’s 19th-century England, and you want to share your vast collection of algaes with the world—but how? If you were a daring and creative botanist/photographer named Anna Atkins, you turned to a new photographic process called cyanotype and created a landmark book called Photographs of British Algae. Two new exhibitions at the Library survey Atkins’s work and the 175 years of inventive and technical innovation she paved the way for. The Library After Hours gets in on the act with an array of crafts, talks, and activities that look back to photography’s past and gaze forward into the medium’s future.

RESOURCES

Recommended Reading

Learn more about photography, cyanotypes, and how nature and science have been expressed through art in these titles, available in our research collections at the Schwarzman Building. For tips on accessing our collections, see p. TK.

Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins
Anna Atkins, Larry J. Schaaf, Hans P. Kraus, Jr.

A Treasury of Flowers: Rare Illustrations from the Collection of the New York Botanical Garden
Frank J. Anderson

Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature
Carol Armstrong, Catherine de Zegher

Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph
Geoffrey Batchen

Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period
Nancy Kathryn Burns, Kristina Wilson

Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing
Roderick Cave

Cyanotypes
Christian Marclay

Nature Illustrated: Flowers Plants, and Trees (Illustrations 1550–1900: From the Collections of The New York Public Library)
Bernard McTigue

Flowers in Shadow: A Photographer Rediscovers a Victorian Botanical Journal
Zeva Oelbaum, Susan Orlean, Sara Stein

What Is a Photograph?
Carol Squiers

Cyanotype: The History, Science and Art of Photographic Printing in Prussian Blue
Mike Ware

The Pressed Plant
Andrea DiNoto

Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science
Ann Thomas

 

Digital Collections

The Library preserves much of Anna Atkins’s original work, including an edition of her groundbreaking book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Explore her unique photographs from home or any Library computer through our digital collections.

 

Support for The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program has been provided by Celeste Bartos, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos Exhibitions Fund, Jonathan Altman, and Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Additional support for Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins and Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works is provided by the Carl Jacobs Foundation, the Great Island Foundation, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Jean L. Karotkin, Nancy D. Grover, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Eric Taubman and Joni Sternbach, on behalf of Penumbra Foundation, and the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation, Inc., in memory of Ruth and Seymour Klein.