Métrica
Anna Atkins — Spiræa aruncus
Anna Atkins — Spiræa aruncus
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A plant's shadow, printed in light.
About the print
To make this, Anna Atkins laid a stalk of goat's-beard (Spiræa aruncus) on paper brushed with iron salts and left it in the sun. Where the plant blocked the light, the paper stayed white; everywhere else it turned Prussian blue. This is a cyanotype — a photograph made without a camera, one of the earliest photographic processes. We chose it for a reason: a cyanotype is already a flat, two-tone print — white silhouette on blue — so it screenprints with total fidelity. The garment is the blue. The ink is the light. Nothing is redrawn.
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About the artist
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) was a British botanist and, by most accounts, the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographs — Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), months before Fox Talbot's. She made hundreds of these blue impressions of algae, ferns, and flowers, turning a scientific record into images that still look like the future.
Anna Atkins · Spiræa aruncus (goat's-beard), cyanotype · 1851–54 · The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 2004.172 · Public domain
Founders Edition · our launch price. $49 after the first edition.
Care — Machine wash cold, inside out. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the print.
Materials & Fit
Sustainably made, ethically certified.
Vegancertified
UPF 50+sun protection
Ethicallyproduced
