The first photographs were blue

In October 1843 a book appeared with no engravings and no woodcuts in it. Every image was a photograph — the first book ever illustrated that way, some eight months before Fox Talbot's Pencil of Nature.¹ Its author was a botanist named Anna Atkins, and she made the pictures without a camera.

How to photograph a shadow

The process was a year old. In 1842 the astronomer John Herschel, a friend of Atkins's family, invented the cyanotype: paper brushed with iron salts, dried in the dark, then laid under an object and left in the sun.² Where the light struck, the paper turned Prussian blue; where the plant blocked it, the paper stayed white. No lens, no negative, no camera — the specimen printed its own silhouette, life-size, in blue.³ This is a cyanotype of Spiraea aruncus, goat's-beard.⁴

A.A.

Atkins signed her books with her initials only — "A.A." Read cold, they were taken for an anonymous amateur, and an amateur was assumed to be a man; she was not identified as the author until 1889, years after her death.⁵ Her father was a scientist at the British Museum, and she had cut some two hundred and fifty engravings for one of his translations before she ever touched the cyanotype.⁶ The blue book was hers.

Science that looks like the future

Photographs of British Algae was a scientific record — a way to fix seaweeds too fine to draw by hand, in her own words "to obtain impressions of the plants themselves."⁷ Only a dozen or so substantially complete copies survive.⁸ But the images outran their purpose. A white plant afloat on deep blue reads less like a specimen sheet than like something made yesterday.

A cyanotype is already what you want on a shirt: a flat, two-colour print, white on blue, made by light. Nothing here is redrawn. The garment is the blue; the ink is the shadow the plant left in the sun.