Before the Camera

The photograph that touches the world

Take a piece of paper treated with iron salts. Place a dried plant directly on its surface. Carry it into the light and hold it there. Rinse it in water. What you have is a cyanotype: a photographic image in which no lens, no camera, and no exposure mechanism stands between the subject and the record. The plant was there. The paper recorded it. The image is not a representation of the thing. It is, in a precise and literal sense, a trace of its physical presence.

This is what Anna Atkins was doing in 1843. Her publication, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, was issued in parts between 1843 and 1853, documenting the algae of the British Isles. The Rijksmuseum's copy contains 307 hand-made cyanotype plates. It was the first book ever illustrated with photographs. And every image in it was made by placing a specimen directly onto chemically treated paper and leaving it in the sun.

No camera. No lens. No darkroom in the conventional sense. Just the object, the chemistry, and the light.

What Atkins understood that others did not

William Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with photogenic drawing at roughly the same time, and his contributions to photographic technique were foundational. But Atkins published first, and she published systematically. Where Talbot was conducting experiments, Atkins was building an archive. Where Talbot was establishing the principle, Atkins was applying it to a body of knowledge that required visual precision: botany.

She was herself a scientist. Schooled by her father in natural history, fluent in the methods of botanical classification, she understood that the existing tools for documenting plant specimens, skilled illustration, detailed engraving, were both time-consuming and subject to the hand that held the pen. A drawing of an alga was always also an interpretation of an alga. The cyanotype removed the interpreter. The plant documented itself.

The result was something new: an image with a different order of fidelity. Not more beautiful than a good botanical illustration, but more direct. The fronds of Polysiphonia formosa in the Rijksmuseum collection are rendered at life size, in the exact configuration they held when pressed to the paper. The structure is there not because someone observed it but because it existed. The photograph preserved the fact of its presence.

Where art and science became the same object

The cyanotype process produces its characteristic deep Prussian blue through an iron-based chemical reaction. The unexposed areas remain white. The image that results is not a neutral document. It is visually striking in a way that no one planned and everyone has noticed ever since: the blue deepens at the edges, the fronds spread across the field, the specimen becomes abstract precisely because it is so completely itself. Atkins was not trying to make beautiful objects. She was trying to make accurate records. The beauty was a consequence of the accuracy.

This is the argument at the centre of this entry in the collection. What the cyanotype produced was an alchemy of art and science: not a compromise between the two, but a process in which they became indistinguishable. The same image that satisfies the botanist’s requirement for structural fidelity also produces an object the printmaker, the designer, and the artist have returned to for 180 years. The blueprint aesthetic that runs through architecture, graphic design, and textile pattern traces directly back to Atkins’ iron-blue pages. She did not intend this legacy. She was documenting algae.

Why this is a Point Zero

The Zero Baseline verification methodology applies four parameters to every entry: verified authentic, photographic in technique, significant in scientific or artistic context, and genuinely inaugural. Atkins holds on all four. But the reason I return to this entry is what it establishes as a Point Zero within the collection: photography as a tool for systematic scientific publication.

Before 1843, science was illustrated by hand. After Atkins, it became possible to publish a scientific record in which the subject had, in a real sense, made its own image. The implications extended far beyond botany. The use of photography in medicine, astronomy, physics, and every other discipline that requires visual evidence rests on the precedent Atkins established: that a photographic record carries an evidential weight that illustration cannot match.

She was the first person to publish that argument in book form. The plates of Photographs of British Algae were distributed by hand to subscribers. No commercial publisher was involved. Atkins produced, printed, and circulated her own archive.

What she teaches us now

The photogram, the camera-less photograph, is photography stripped to its essential operation: light, chemistry, surface, time. What makes an image photographic is not the presence of a lens but the direct action of light on a photosensitive material. Atkins understood this not as a theoretical proposition but as a practical method, and she used it to produce one of the most consequential bodies of work in the medium’s history.

When I look at Polysiphonia formosa in the Rijksmuseum collection, I see a photograph in the fullest sense: a record of something that was present, rendered with a fidelity no hand could replicate, carrying the evidence of its own making in every blue-white line.

Atkins got there first. Without a camera. In 1843. That is why it is in this collection.

RESOURCES:

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Image credit: Anna Atkins, Polysiphonia formosa, c.1843–53. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Purchased with the support of the BankGiro Lottery, the Familie W. Cordia/Rijksmuseum Fonds and the Paul Huf Fonds/Rijksmuseum Fonds. Public domain.

© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.