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Anna Atkins | Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
English artist Anna Atkins was the first to publish a book featuring photographic illustrations in October 1843. She created around 400 plates and developed over 8,000 individual images. Such a labor-intensive process meant that her first edition was just 15 books. The cyanotype had been invented just one year earlier by Sir Jon Herschel, a family friend of Atkins (Cave, 2014, p. 184). Atkins artfully arranged the algae in appreciation for the unity of art and science (The MET, 2023). -
William Henry Fox Talbot | The Pencil of Nature
Englishman Talbot invented the calotype, the first photographic process that included a negative from which more reproductions of the image could be made. This was developed separately from the French processes of Niépce and Daguerre (Google Arts & Culture, 2023). "Talbot's Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs...[was] a milestone in the art of the book greater than any since Gutenberg's invention of moveable type" (The MET, 2023). -
Adolphe Duperly | Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica
Adolphe Duperly published his book of lithographic illustrations in installments in 1844. The images were based on the first daguerreotype photos of Jamaica, taken by Duperly. Because daguerreotypes required long exposure times, lithographs created using these early photographic images were often altered to create a still, compositionally compelling scene. Duperly's daguerreotype studio in Jamaica operated through the 1920s (Cave, 2014, pp. 186-187). -
Pierre Trémaux | Voyage au Soudan Oriental
Pierre Trémaux was a French architect, traveler, and photographer. Voyage au Soudan Oriental featured photographs made using Talbot's calotype method pasted alongside lithographs of the same photos, showing a progression of illustrative imagery. "This work cemented the appearance of photography in books, in all its forms: it brought together lithographic interpretations, original prints stuck in by hand, and photo-lithographs" (Google Arts & Culture, 2023). -
Henry Essenhigh Corke | Wild Flowers as they Grow: Photographed in Colour Direct from Nature
Color photography emerged in the late 1800s thanks to new advances in photographic technology. The autochrome became the first widely used color photography process, introduced by French Lumière brothers in 1907 (Romer, Delamoire, 1989). Henry Essenhigh Corke, "professional photographer and amateur botanist" published a book featuring autochrome photos in 1911, making it among the first to showcase vivid, true-to-life imagery in a publication (Fuchs, 2013).