Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Rodney Engen

Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature Edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher Princeton University Press 32.50 [pounds sterling]/$ 49.95 ISBN 0 691 11948 1

The search for a means of recording natural phenomena has intrigued and challenged even the most inventive artists and scientists. The Victorians rose to this challenge with a characteristic determination that seems daunting to us today. Scores of dedicated artists and scholars explored the world and brought back records of a new and staggering brilliance that served to inspire even the most doubtful. The techniques for creating such records of the natural world are the subject of this impressive new book and exhibition catalogue, produced for the Drawing Center, New York, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

Taking mid-nineteenth-century Britain as a starting point, the organisers have attempted to survey the history of 'nature graphics', explaining how photography was a short-lived but useful tool for the plant hunter. Photographic terminology of the time is telling, for these were not photographs created by cameras but were more simply produced by the sun poured over a chemical-soaked paper on which lay a natural specimen. William Fox Talbot aptly called the results 'sun pictures', as they were said to 'draw themselves' miraculously, although they were soon dubbed a more scientific sounding 'botanograph' or 'photogenic drawings' when he published his pioneering work The Pencil of Nature in 1844.

It was Talbot's dream that such camera-less photography could allow 'every man to be his own printer and publisher'. Indeed, when Michael Faraday first saw Talbot's 'fairy pictures' he marvelled, 'No human hand has hitherto traced such lines as these drawings employ. And what man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress it is impossible to predict.' Others saw an air of divine intervention in works they believed could only be the work of God ('His pencil grows in every flower').

Surprisingly, the very first person to publish a photographic record from nature was not Fox Talbot, but Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a dedicated amateur naturalist, the daughter of a British Museum curator and wife of a wealthy railwayman with coffee plantations in Jamaica (from where she received fern specimens for photographing). Anna features as the pivotal point in this survey. She was typical of her class and period, began her amateur naturalist career drawing and watercolouring 200 exquisite shells for a publication by her father, and then turned to photography, inspired in particular by her Kentish neighbour Sir John Herschel, who invented the cynotype photographic process, which used Prussian blue in a process best known today from architect's blueprints. The lyrical, even blue tones seemed ideal for the marine subjects Atkins collected along the Kentish coast and she produced over 400 cynotypes of algaes and kelps and seaweeds for her pioneering volume British Algae: Cynotype Impressions (1843-53). This she followed by two further volumes of British and foreign ferns and flowers, each privately printed (only some thirteen examples are known).

These are the 'ocean flowers' alluded to in the book's title. The two curators and authors of the six essays have assembled a plethora of British natural-history items from Scottish and English collections as well as the Gilman Paper Company and Gernsheim photographic collections to attempt a reassessment of 'natural history imagery', as they call it. Here are over 200 beautifully printed colour reproductions of the hand-coloured drawings and prints, nature prints (images taken directly from inked specimens) and 'natural illustrations' (the specimens themselves mounted on paper so not to crumble and disintegrate). These led the way for Anna Atkins, Fox Talbot and the photographic revolution that, the authors point out, was 'intended to complement not supercede the other means of recording Nature'.

This is a fascinating subject but sadly the book's six catalogue essays do it a disservice by meandering, using baffling terminology and pontificating on Marxist-feminist interpretations of the artist-photographers; or they present scientific treatises in search of a methodology. Most of the biographical information about Anna Atkins has to be gleaned from the footnotes. The authors claim natural-history photography 'generated as much creative fervour as digital media have in recent years' but sadly this has not been so, for the domain of the 'hand artist' has retained its hold over the world of botanical illustration today. Moreover, there are some tiresome expositions of intent surrounding Anna Atkins's cynotypes that prove embarrassing : 'Does the seaweed come to act upon, to inspire the artist as much as the artist does the seaweed, since it is now being depicted as evaporating smoke or fleeting glories in what seems to have become the unbound spaces of blue profundity and endless possibility ?' Her work is much better served by the 1985 monograph Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms.