Bluest Flos
BOUQUETS
We travel miles to pay homage to our photo fathers. As for Gods, we pilgrimage to sites where they have lived and made work. Bringing ourselves as offerings to these spaces, in hopes to get close to what we think is the divine. Visiting those places where they made pictures with light and air. Journeying to the exact position where they once stood, snapping pictures of the same earthen monument – a vast sky, a mountain, a bolder. However, I ask where are the sojourns to our foremothers? Just as prolific and remarkable. The path paved before us, where are the feet that follow in their long legacies?
Historical contributions of women in the arts and sciences are often only known because they are linked to men. Thus is the case of Anna Atkins. A woman in her forties who amassed more than 6,000 prints in the span of ten years in the mid 1800’s of algae only to be known as “Anonymous Author” in a publication written for The British Journal of Photography by 1889. Many years later, Larry Schaaf fortuitously found evidence of her cyanotypes through a statement written by W. Henry Fox Talbot of a “lady” and a prodigious set of prints. It was not until 1985 that Atkins was properly given credit for publishing the first photographic book and for her significant contribution to photography.
This collection of work, Bluest flos*, is my way of breathing new light back into Anna’s life work – an obsession with flowers made visible through the cyanotype process. All 150 + specimens here are those from Anna’s herbarium housed at the Natural History Museum of London. These specimens were plucked, pressed, preserved, and given to the museum by Anna to mark science, history and one woman’s possession and collection. In collaboration with John Hunnex, Curator, of the British and Irish Herbarium, I was given access to these flowering plants. Each one reimaged, then later arranged and reimagined into bouquets, forms and fields.
Each impression honors the everlasting agency of these flowers and the woman behind them by journeying to her hometown of Halstead, England to make prints under the same sun, water, light and air.
*Latin for flower; bloom.
