Tracey Thorne
Anna Atkins: Cyanotypes, Jamaica and Slavery
Cyanotype: Colonial Imprints: Anna Atkins Portait, Tracey Thorne, 2025.
Starting to think about Anna Atkins: Cyanotypes, Jamaica and Slavery
I first started making cyanotypes during the lockdown, diving headfirst into this nineteenth-century photographic process using my own digital negatives to produce prints. I wasn’t drawn in through its traditional use, like many people are, through the botanical prints or ‘photograms’ as they are known. For me, it was a way of getting closer to my photography: a hands-on, tactile process with deep blues that gave a kind of weight to images I’d otherwise only seen on a screen.
It was only after falling for the process that I began to uncover its history, and with it, the name Anna Atkins. I knew her as the woman often described as the first female photographer, the acclaimed early woman photographer who published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843) using the cyanotype process. But as I continued to work with the process, particularly while making work that explores colonial legacies in Jamaica, I began to learn more about the unspoken parts of her story.
In 1825, Atkins married John Pelly Atkins, a West Indian merchant and the son of John Alderman Atkins—a slaveholder and plantation owner in Jamaica. Her husband’s family were enslavers, plantation owners with direct links to Jamaica’s sugar economy. That history was unsettling, and I found myself asking what it means to use a process so rooted in colonial science, botany, and imperial mapping to now interrogate those same legacies—especially given that, while most of her work focused on British specimens, Atkins also included plants from the colonies, like her cyanotypes of Jamaica ferns.
It felt important to pause and reflect—not just on Atkins and her work, but on how cyanotype itself carries a colonial legacy. Very little has been written about these connections, and yet they feel essential when having conversations with others about the medium. For me, this has become a way to become more consciously rooted in my practice, acknowledging its historical connections, sitting with the complexities and contradictions, and holding space for both beauty and violence in the materials we inherit.
Anna Atkins' contributions to the world of photography and botany remain invaluable, and her cyanotype prints continue to be celebrated for their beauty and precision. However, it is also important to acknowledge the socio-economic context in which she lived. Her husband’s connection to the sugar trade and the profits derived from slavery inevitably impacted her career and legacy. Understanding this connection adds depth to our appreciation of her work and highlights the complexities of historical figures whose lives were often intertwined with systems of exploitation and colonialism.
Cheilanthes Microphylla (Jamaica),
c. 1850, Anna Atkins
Register of Slaves filed for Trafalgar Suagr Plantation in Jamaica, attonreny for John Atkins Esquire, 1832, National Archives
The image on the left is a widely circulated portrait of Anna Atkins made in 1861, with its source remaining unknown. Photographic archives and collections that reference Atkins often place her work within the context of British colonialism, linking her practice of cyanotype to imperial histories.
In response, I sought to create a new image that would unify these colonial histories, blending fragments of the past into a contemporary impression. Using Photoshop, I layered three elements: the original portrait of Atkins, a copy of the slave register from the Trafalgar sugar plantation in Jamaica, and an image of her fern impression, Cheilanthes Microphylla (Jamaica, c. 1850) forms a new pattern on her dress.
The final piece was cyanotyped, bleached, and toned in green tea to create a new visual impression—one that merges these histories into a unified whole.
Below is the new cyanotype.
Title: Cyanotype: Colonial Imprints – Anna Atkins Portrait, Tracey Thorne, 2025.
