Rhapsodies in Blue : Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes – The Public Domain Review
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/anna-atkins-cyanotypes
Superbe article, qui partant de cyanotypes d’algues revisite la question de l’illustration botanique, et les débats autour de la théorie de l’évolution autant que de l’étude des relations entre espèces passant avant la description isolée d’une espèce. Un travail de poète au XIXeme siècle... dont Goethe fut un des porteurs. Anticipation. Et en plus les illustrations sont magnifiques.
We can see a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced — supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order.
In many ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We discount such a lesson at our peril.
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Anna Atkins 1843
New York Public Library
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public Domain Review
The editors would like to thank Madeline Grimm, who oversaw the initial rounds of editing on this essay for Lapham’s Quarterly.
Paige Hirschey is an independent writer and critic specializing in the intersection of art, science, and technology. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto.
#Domaine_public #Cyanotypes #Algues #Théorie_evolution #Botanique
