Anna Atkins worked with a team of assistants from 1843 to 1853 to produce a beautiful monograph, Photographs of British Algae, using the cyanotype method invented by John Herschel in 1842. (You might know it as the technology that creates blueprints.) Atkins arranged pieces of seaweed and algae, using specimens she collected herself or received from other amateur scientists, on 10″-by-8″ paper that had been soaked in chemicals, then exposed them to light in order to create dark-blue images with white leaf-shaped reliefs.
"Some of the great mysteries of the natural world are things from the sea, and algae are accessible, beautiful, and various."
-Atkins
"Nature educates us into beauty and inwardness and is a source of the most noble pleasure."
"There are reasons why natural things are beautiful. The forms of nature, developed out of necessity are functional. And we find them beautiful precisely because... they are functional."
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