Photographs of British algae: cyanotype impressions
Anna Atkins's privately issued botanical album, begun in 1843 in Kent and distributed in parts to British naturalists, records seaweeds as cyanotype contact prints using Herschel's process. Each plate is a white silhouette of a specimen on saturated Prussian blue, with a handwritten Latin name in reversed script, giving designers ready-made negative-space botanical shapes and branching linear forms.
