The Yale British Studies Colloquium presents
Tara Murray, PhD student in Film and Media Studies, Yale University:
“What Lies Beyond the Blue: Notes on Anna Atkins’s Colonial Legacy.”
In 1979, photohistorian Larry Schaaf challenged the dominant historical narratives of early photography by calling attention to the work of Anna Atkins. One year prior to William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 The Pencil of Nature, Atkins reproduced cyanotypes in her 1843 book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, which we now know as the first book to contain photographic prints. Although Schaaf’s championing of Atkins’s legacy troubles the mid-nineteenth century notion of the gentleman scholar (and, indeed, photographer), her status as a trailblazer for women in the history of photography nevertheless merits further complication, due to Atkins’s embeddedness — both materially and ideologically — in the British colonial project of economic botany. At the same time, the cyanotype remains a unique mode of cameraless photography that draws out a new understanding of the ontology of the photographic image: that of fixity. This paper argues that the technological advancement of image fixation as performed by the cyanotype functioned as a fixer for national identity for the new United Kingdom, within the metropole and without.
Tara Murray’s work attends to the intersections between and among material culture, histories of visual technologies, and epistemology with a particular interest in the productive tension between what technologies can do and what they actually do.