Anna Atkins

And that, so it was really natural to just sort of move into doing that after a certain time 'cause there wa- there wasn't any darkroom down here.

So I had to really sort of give up that, but that's when I, um, I went into the pre- pre-silver gelatin print in the mid-19th century, Anna Atkins cyanotype, that sort of thing.

And that was it because it, it allowed me to get back taking pictures- But to make the picture, I used cyanotypes, Van Dyke brown, I used the alternative pre-darkroom.

Did some teaching, and then one day, uh, I put everything away in my studio and started to make little paintings.

So first of all, we need to know what is a cyanotype?

Okay.

A cyanotype is a mid 19th century, it's one of the very first, uh, photographic, uh, chemicals to make a picture, and it was discovered by, uh, Sir, Sir Har- Har- Howard Herschel, and his niece was Anna Atkins, who was a, um, well, you know, she s- she sort of collected herbs and, and, uh, grasses and that kinda thing, and she wrote two books about it, and she used the cyanotype photogram method to illustrate the books.

And so as a result, she's the first published woman, first publ- published photographer ever.

But already there was pushback on that, even in those early days.

Who was Anna Atkins?

I mean, she is a really interesting figure in early photography.

She was very well educated and she started to experiment with something called cyanotypes, which was invented by Sir John Herschel, who was also very influential in early photography.

It's been a long time since I've tried to make a photogram that functions more like-

Like an Anna Atkins or something.

Yeah.

Exactly.