Digital Editions
Newsletters
Subscribe
Digital Editions
Newsletters
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh

How botany helped give birth to photography

By Aimee Dawson
16 June 2017
Share

A survey of early photography at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (New Realities: Photography in the 19th Century, 17 June-17 September) will focus on “the noisy century” of the medium, says the show’s curator, Mattie Boom. Around 300 pictures from the museum’s collection of more than 150,000 photographs will be included. Here, Boom discusses Anna Atkins’s Seaweed Studies (1843−53), a key work in the exhibition.

"This extremely rare book is an important recent acquisition for the Rijksmuseum. The album documents 307 examples of seaweed and was made by the first female photographer, Anna Atkins, using the cyanotype process, hence its blue colour. Created only four years after the invention of photography, it really defines the beginning of the medium and, although her books were on botany, it can be seen as early photographic art. There are only 20 albums like this one left in the world and only two others of this size. We have given it a whole room at the start of the exhibition; at the centre will be the book itself and, on cyan-coloured walls, will be reproductions of the photographs."

Share
Subscribe to The Art Newspaper’s digital newsletter for your daily digest of essential news, views and analysis from the international art world delivered directly to your inbox.
Newsletter sign-up
Information
About
Contact
Cookie policy
Data protection
Privacy policy
Frequently Asked Questions
Subscription T&Cs
Terms and conditions
Advertise
Sister Papers
Sponsorship policy
Follow us
Instagram
Bluesky
LinkedIn
Facebook
TikTok
YouTube
© The Art Newspaper

Related content

Exhibitionspreview
15 September 2022

The Black studio photographers of 19th and early 20th-century America come into focus

A new exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art focuses on the flourishing African American portraiture industry that emerged immediately after photography’s invention

Karen Chernick
Interviewarchive
31 May 1996

An interview with Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

“It is impossible to say in advance when photography is an art and when it is not”

Emmanuel Fessy
Surfacing on the marketnews
30 September 2015

Surfacing on the market: Pioneer of colour photography

Phillips, New York, Innovators of Photography: a Private East Coast Collection, 8 October

Harriet Brooks-Ward
Photographynews
30 May 2024

Getty Research Institute acquires photography dealer Peter MacGill's archive

The extensive archive, which includes client correspondence and daily records, will be catalogued over the course of the next few years

Torey Akers