Ceylon

The cyanotype is an iron based photographic process that was often used to create photograms or camera-less images. Anna Atkins made this work by simply placing fern specimens from Ceylon on this piece of paper and leaving it out under the sun. When the specimens were removed and the paper washed, the shadow trace of the ferns remained. Atkins was a botanist and one of the first females to work with any photographic process and this is the oldest photograph by a female in the museum’s collection.