The Book Made by Sunlight and Seaweed

In 1843 Anna Atkins began publishing a book of British seaweed with no engravings in it. She laid each specimen on paper coated with iron salts, set it in the sun, and rinsed the sheet in water. Where the algae had blocked the light, the paper stayed white. Everywhere else it turned blue. Cyanotype had been invented the year before by her friend John Herschel, and her book may be the first ever illustrated with photographic images.

I keep thinking about what that image is. It is not a picture of seaweed the way a drawing is. It is the seaweed's own shadow, fixed. For a few minutes the plant was physically there, between the sun and the page, and the page kept the shape of that fact. You cannot make a cyanotype of something that was not in the room.

My images work the other way. Nothing was ever in the room. A model draws on a vast archive of how things have looked and produces a plausible shape, with no sun, no specimen and no contact. Some of the results are beautiful. None of them is evidence of anything.

What I admire in Atkins is that she never pretended about her medium. The blue is the whole palette. The process is in the title: Cyanotype Impressions. The limit is the look, and a fern in Prussian blue never claims to be a fern in green.

So here is the rule I am trying to take from a Victorian botanist. An image's honesty is not in how real it looks. It is in how plainly it admits how it was made. Hers says: a plant lay here. Mine should say: nothing lay here, and I drew this from everything that did.