Watch the Celebrated Ballerina Anna Pavlova Perform “The Dying Swan” (1925)

in Biology, Dance, Video - Arts & Culture | November 11th, 2016

Pre­pare my swan cos­tume.

— alleged last words of bal­le­ri­na Anna Pavlo­va, as report­ed by her hus­band

The Inter­net sug­gests that swans are fair­ly tough spec­i­mens, quick to hiss and flap at any YouTu­ber unwise enough to vio­late their per­son­al space with a video cam­era.

The cel­e­brat­ed bal­le­ri­na Anna Pavlo­va (1881–1931) paints a dif­fer­ent pic­ture in her sig­na­ture piece, The Dying Swan.

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Mikhail Fokine cre­at­ed the four minute solo in 1905 at Pavlova’s request, draw­ing on her admi­ra­tion for some res­i­dent swans in a Leningrad pub­lic park and Alfred, Lord Ten­nyson’s poem “The Dying Swan.”

It was per­haps a hap­py acci­dent that he had just learned how to play Camille Saint-Saëns’ Le Cygne from Le Car­naval des Ani­maux on his man­dolin. Per­formed on cel­lo, as orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, it sup­plies a mood of gor­geous melan­choly with which to observe the tit­u­lar char­ac­ter’s en pointe death throes.

Fokine’s descrip­tion of the work’s cre­ation in Dance Mag­a­zine’s August 1931 issue speaks to the rig­or of these prac­ti­tion­ers and their art form:

It was almost an impro­vi­sa­tion. I danced in front of her [Pavlo­va], she direct­ly behind me. Then she danced and I walked along­side her, curv­ing her arms and cor­rect­ing details of pos­es. Pri­or to this com­po­si­tion, I was accused of bare­foot­ed ten­den­cies and of reject­ing toe danc­ing in gen­er­al. The Dying Swan was my answer to such criticism…The dance is tech­ni­cal­ly more dif­fi­cult than it may appear. The dancer moves con­stant­ly using  dif­fer­ent bour­rees. The feet must be beau­ti­ful, express­ing a trem­bling. All paus­es in sus-sous must show legs brought to one point. The arms and the back work inde­pen­dent­ly of the feet which con­tin­ue to move reg­u­lar­ly.

The archival footage from 1925, above, con­veys what Fokine’s words cannot—the deep emo­tion for which this par­tic­u­lar inter­preter was known. It’s a vis­cer­al expe­ri­ence to watch this bro­ken ani­mal fight­ing for its sur­vival, quiv­er­ing and heav­ing, before crum­pling at last. (A pity that this ver­sion cuts off so abrupt­ly… that final note should linger.)

Pavlo­va per­formed The Dying Swan around 4000 times over the course of her career, nev­er sick­en­ing of it, or of the beasts who inspired it. Swans pop­u­lat­ed a small pond at her Eng­lish coun­try home. You can wit­ness her fond­ness for them, below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

Bal­let Dancers Do Their Hard­est Moves in Slow Motion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Bacteria Become Resistant to Antibiotics in a Matter of Days: A Quick, Stop-Motion Film

in Biology | September 16th, 2016

The video above should ter­ri­fy you a lit­tle. Record­ed at Har­vard Med­ical School (HMS), the time-motion film lets you see “bac­te­ria [Escherichia coli] devel­op resis­tance to increas­ing­ly high­er dos­es of antibi­otics in a mat­ter of days.” And it amounts, says Har­vard, to “the first large-scale glimpse of the maneu­vers of bac­te­ria as they encounter increas­ing­ly high­er dos­es of antibi­otics and adapt to survive—and thrive—in them.” You can learn more about the exper­i­ment itself, and the video tech­niques used to make the stop motion, over at HMS. The exper­i­ment is also described in the Sep­tem­ber 9 issue of Sci­ence. 

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

An Artis­tic Por­trait of Stephen Fry Made From His Own Bac­te­ria

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Har­vard Thinks Big 4 Offers TED-Style Talks on Stats, Milk, and Traf­fic-Direct­ing Mimes

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

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The Spellbinding Art of Human Anatomy: From the Renaissance to Our Modern Times

in Art, Biology, TED Talks | August 29th, 2016

Many of us have a fraught rela­tion­ship with what med­ical illus­tra­tor Vanes­sa Ruiz, above, refers to as our anatom­i­cal selves.

You may have received the Vis­i­ble Man for your 8th birth­day, only to for­get, some thir­ty years lat­er, what your spleen looks like, where it’s locat­ed and what it does.

We know more about the inner work­ings of our appli­ances than we do our own bod­ies. Why? Large­ly because we saved the man­u­al that came with our dish­wash­er, and refer to it when our glass­ware is cov­ered in spots.

As Ruiz not­ed in her TED-Med talk last Novem­ber, there’s a wealth of eas­i­ly acces­si­ble detailed anatom­i­cal illus­tra­tions, but we tend to keep them out of sight, and thus out of mind. Once a stu­dent is fin­ished with his or her med­ical text­book or app, he or she rarely seeks those pic­tures out again. Those of us out­side the med­ical pro­fes­sion have spent very lit­tle time con­sid­er­ing the way our bod­i­ly sys­tems are put togeth­er.

This lack of engage­ment prompt­ed Ruiz to found the aggre­gate blog Street Anato­my, devot­ed to fer­ret­ing out the inter­sec­tion between anatom­i­cal illus­tra­tion and pub­lic art. Expo­sure is key. In cre­at­ing star­tling, body-based images—and what is more star­tling than a flayed human or piece thereof?—the artist reminds view­ers of what lurks beneath their own skin.

Ruiz is deeply inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of her craft, a prac­tice which can be dat­ed to Renais­sance man Leonar­do da Vin­ci. She sees beau­ty in bizarre ear­ly exam­ples which insert­ed sev­ered limbs into still lives and posed semi-dis­sect­ed cadav­ers next to pop­u­lar attrac­tions, such as Clara, the tour­ing rhi­no.

These days, the sub­jects of those pur­pose­ful illus­tra­tions are more like­ly to be ren­dered as 3‑D com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed ani­ma­tions.

The more old school approach is vis­i­ble in the work of the artists Ruiz cham­pi­ons, such as Fer­nan­do Vicente, who couch­es 19th-cen­tu­ry male anatom­i­cal plates inside more con­tem­po­rary female pin-ups and fash­ion illus­tra­tions.

Artist Jason Free­ny gives Bar­bie, Legos, and Mario the Vis­i­ble Man treat­ment.

Noah Scalin, who spent 2007 cre­at­ing a skull a day, made a gut-filled gun and titled it “Anato­my of War.”

But let us not pre­sume all view­ers are in total igno­rance of their bod­ies’ work­ings. A woman whose ankle had been smashed in a roller skat­ing acci­dent com­mis­sioned archi­tect Fed­eri­co Car­ba­jal to doc­u­ment its recon­struc­tion with one of his anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate wire sculp­tures. Car­ba­jal incor­po­rat­ed his bene­fac­tor’s sur­gi­cal screws.

Check out Ruiz’s rec­om­mend­ed read­ing list to delve into the sub­ject more deeply.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

Micro­scop­ic Bat­tle­field: Watch as a Killer T Cell Attacks a Can­cer Cell

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Oliver Sacks’ Final Interview: A First Look

in Biology, Life, Neuroscience | August 22nd, 2016

It’s been near­ly a year since the poet lau­re­ate of med­i­cine, author and neu­rol­o­gist Oliv­er Sacks, took his final bow as a sen­tient being on this beau­ti­ful plan­et, suc­cumb­ing, at 82, to metas­tases of ocu­lar melanoma which spread to his liv­er.

The New York­er marks the occa­sion by pub­lish­ing Sacks’ fel­low neu­rol­o­gist and author Dr. Orrin Devin­sky’s rec­ol­lec­tion of their long­stand­ing friend­ship. Devin­sky paints a vivid pic­ture of an excep­tion­al­ly com­pas­sion­ate man, who felt a kin­ship not only with starfish, jel­ly­fish, and octopi, but also humans in both finan­cial and emo­tion­al need.

The piece becomes even more pow­er­ful in light of Sacks’ final inter­view, above, part of film­mak­er Ric Burns’ upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary, Oliv­er Sacks: His Own Life.

Sacks pep­pers his remarks with aston­ish­ing bio­log­i­cal tid­bits, a com­pul­sion that delight­ed his friend Devin­sky on their fre­quent ear­ly morn­ing bike rides along New York City’s west side.

(Palatal myoclonus—or rhyth­mic pulsing—in the palate, eardrum and strap mus­cles are ves­ti­gial evi­dence that humans once had gills!)

(The dandelion’s name evolved from dent de lion, French for lion’s tooth, a struc­ture the spikes on its ser­rat­ed leaves could be said to resem­ble. Also, cer­tain dan­de­lion species repro­duce asex­u­al­ly, and Sacks had no fear about eat­ing an unwashed spec­i­men he plucked from the ques­tion­ably san­i­tary grounds of River­side Park!)

The mus­ings that war­rant the melan­choly piano and strings accom­pa­ny­ing Burns’ excerpt are of a more per­son­al nature. Sacks’ was total­ly immersed in his cho­sen sub­ject. His moth­er was a com­par­a­tive anatomist and sur­geon, and his boy­ish inter­est in the hard sci­ences is what led him to biol­o­gy. A life­time of sci­en­tif­ic obser­va­tion and clin­i­cal inter­ac­tion only add to the poet­ry of his thoughts on death:

My gen­er­a­tion is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abrup­tion, a tear­ing away of part of myself. There will be nobody like us when we are gone, but then there is nobody like any­body ever. When peo­ple die they can­not be replaced. They leave holes that can­not be filled. It is the fate, the genet­ic and neur­al fate of every human being to be a unique indi­vid­ual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. Even so, I am shocked and sad­dened at the sen­tence of death, and I can­not pre­tend I am with­out fear. But my pre­dom­i­nant feel­ing is one of grat­i­tude. I have loved and been loved. I have been giv­en much and I have giv­en some­thing in return. I have read and trav­eled and thought and writ­ten. I have had an inter­course with the world, the spe­cial inter­course of writ­ers and read­ers. Above all, I have been a sen­tient being, a think­ing ani­mal on this beau­ti­ful plan­et, and this in itself has been an enor­mous priv­i­lege and adven­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

A Fas­ci­nat­ing Case Study by Oliv­er Sacks Inspires a Short Ani­mat­ed Film, The Lost Mariner

Oliv­er Sacks’ Last Tweet Shows Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Mov­ing­ly Flash­mobbed in Spain

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est com­ic con­trasts the birth of her sec­ond child with the uncen­sored gore of Game of Thrones. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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In Touching Video, People with Alzheimer’s Tell Us Which Memories They Never Want to Forget

in Biology, Health, Life, Science | July 22nd, 2016

Direc­tor Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1999 film After­life tasks its recent­ly deceased char­ac­ters with choos­ing a sin­gle mem­o­ry to take with them, as they move into the great unknown.

The sub­jects of “On Mem­o­ry,” above, are all very much alive, but they too, have great cause to sift through a life­time’s worth of mem­o­ries. All have been diag­nosed with Alzheimer’s dis­ease. They range in age from 48 to 70. Two have been liv­ing with their diag­noses for six years. The baby of the group received hers just last year.

Those who have no per­son­al con­nec­tion to Alzheimer’s are like­ly to have a clear­er pic­ture of the disease’s advanced stage than its ear­ly pre­sen­ta­tion. A few min­utes with Myr­i­am Mar­quez, Lon Cole, Frances Smersh, Irene Japha, Nan­cy John­son, and Bob Welling­ton should rem­e­dy that.

All six are able to recall and describe the sig­nif­i­cant events of their youth. At the interviewer’s request, they reflect on the pain of los­ing beloved par­ents and the plea­sure of first kiss­es. Their pow­ers of sen­so­ry recall bring back their ear­li­est mem­o­ries, includ­ing what the weath­er was like that day.

The recent past? Much hazier. At present, these indi­vid­u­als’ mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment resem­ble benign age-relat­ed mem­o­ry slips quite close­ly. Their diag­noses are what lends urgency to their answers. The prospect of for­get­ting chil­dren and spouse’s names is very real to them.

Knowl­edge of the inter­vie­wees’ diag­noses can’t but help sharp­en view­ers’ eyes for dis­tinct facial expres­sions, speech pat­terns, and indi­vid­ual tem­pera­ments. They share a com­mon diag­no­sis, but for now, there’s no dif­fi­cul­ty dis­tin­guish­ing between the six unique per­son­al­i­ties, each informed by a wealth of expe­ri­ence.

The video is a step up for viral video pro­duc­er Cut, cre­ator of such inter­net sen­sa­tions as the Truth or Drink series and Grand­mas Smok­ing Weed for the First Time. This video, which directs view­ers to the Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion for more infor­ma­tion, deserves an even wider audi­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Act of Love: A Strange, Wonderful Visual Dictionary of Animal Courtship

in Biology, Comedy, Dance, Life, Science | April 15th, 2016

As var­i­ous nature doc­u­men­taries over the years have made explic­it, the ani­mal king­dom pos­sess­es courtship rit­u­als of such yearn­ing and grace, they can make the erot­ic fum­blings of our species seem a very clum­sy dance indeed.

The above spot for Japan’s first con­dom man­u­fac­tur­er, Saga­mi Indus­tries, offers a vision of how humans might bring a lit­tle ani­mal feel­ing to their ten­der moments.

(It’s worth not­ing that while this delight is spon­sored by a con­dom com­pa­ny, humans are the only ani­mal to take pro­phy­lac­tic mea­sures to ward off sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­eases and unwant­ed preg­nan­cies.)

Like actress Isabel­la Rosselli­ni, cre­ator of the mar­velous Green Porno series, direc­tor Greg Brunk­alla has an eye for both the fas­ci­nat­ing and the absurd.

But with­out Rossellini’s plain­spo­ken nar­ra­tion, this Act of Love remains mys­te­ri­ous, until the end, when the iden­ti­ty of the crea­tures the human dancers are embody­ing is revealed. Those of us who aren’t zool­o­gists will like­ly find that their cloth­ing pro­vides the clear­est clues up until that point.

Bisex­u­al behav­ior is ram­pant in the ani­mal world, but out­side of a not par­tic­u­lar­ly kinky-seem­ing pink-clad group, the five cou­ples in the ad are all het­ero­sex­u­al.

Sagami’s Eng­lish web­site takes a broad­er view, with in-depth reports on the sex­u­al prac­tices of 73 dif­fer­ent beasts, birds and insects. Tax­on­o­my, habi­tat, and size range are not­ed — a sci­en­tif­ic approach to what could very well serve as non-human online dat­ing pro­files.

Australia’s Superb Fairy Wrens are into open rela­tion­ships.

Lioness­es’ unabashed pref­er­ence for vir­ile young males gets them dubbed “true cougars.”

And E.B. White fans may find them­selves shocked by the vig­or of cou­pling orb weavers, seem­ing­ly the one fact of spi­der life Char­lotte refrained from explain­ing to her piglet friend, Wilbur :

After mat­ing, the male sud­den­ly sev­ers the mat­ing thread so that both he and the female end up dan­gling at sep­a­rate ends. This may look like a very abrupt part­ing of ways, but not so fast! The male imme­di­ate­ly re-strings his mat­ing thread and resumes his strum­ming. And despite hav­ing been cast off so sud­den­ly, the female again falls under the spell of his courtship vibra­tions, trans­fer­ring to the new mat­ing thread to mate a sec­ond time. As soon as they do so, the male sev­ers the thread once more so that the two spi­ders can go through the whole rou­tine again…and again and again and again. 

Explore Sagami’s entire col­lec­tion of not-so-pri­vate ani­mal lives here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Isabel­la Rosselli­ni Embody the Ani­mal Kingdom’s Most Shock­ing Mater­nal Instincts in Mam­mas

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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You Can Find the Proof of Evolution in Our Own Spare Body Parts: From Third Molars to Vestigial Tails

in Biology | March 22nd, 2016

Look­ing for proof of evo­lu­tion? Per­haps you don’t need to look much beyond your own body. Cre­at­ed by Vox, the video above high­lights the ves­ti­gial body parts and traits we’ve retained from ear­li­er points in our evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry. Writes Vox’s Joss Fong:

Ves­ti­gial struc­tures are evo­lu­tion’s left­overs — body parts that, through inher­i­tance, have out­lived the con­text in which they arose. Some of the most delight­ful reminders of the com­mon ances­try we share with oth­er ani­mals, they show that the build­ing blocks of the human body pre­date our species by hun­dreds of mil­lions of years.

For a clos­er look at the mechan­ics of evo­lu­tion, you can spend time with Yale’s open course, Prin­ci­ples of Evo­lu­tion, Ecol­o­gy and Behav­ior, which is part of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es. But if you don’t want to dig ter­ri­bly deep, then start with Carl Sagan’s eight minute ani­mat­ed primer. It’s pet­ty hard to beat.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Watch 570 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion on Earth in 60 Sec­onds

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

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The First Photo-Illustrated Book, Anna Atkins’ Austerely Beautiful Photographs of British Algae (1843)

in Biology, Books, Photography, Science | January 8th, 2016

algae cover (1)

Some of our favorite, and most pop­u­lar, posts at Open Cul­ture focus on book illus­tra­tion. From fine art to graph­ic design, from the sub­lime to the ridicu­lous to the pure­ly tech­ni­cal, the art used to visu­al­ize beloved works of lit­er­a­ture and sci­en­tif­ic texts cap­ti­vates us. Per­haps that’s in part because we encounter illus­tra­tion so rarely these days, what with the tri­umph of pho­tog­ra­phy and, now, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal images, which are so easy to cre­ate and repro­duce that too few give suf­fi­cient con­sid­er­a­tion to aes­thet­ic essen­tials. Graph­ic nov­els and comics aside, the care­ful­ly hand-illus­trat­ed book or peri­od­i­cal has become some­thing of a nov­el­ty.

Atkins 2

But when we reach back to the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, it was pho­tog­ra­phy that was nov­el and graph­ic art the norm. So what was the sub­ject of the first book to use pho­to­graph­ic illus­tra­tion? Mon­u­ments? Land­scapes? Celebri­ties? No: algae.

Eng­lish botanist Anna Atkins—who is not only cred­it­ed as the first per­son to make a book illus­trat­ed with pho­tographs, but as the first woman to make a photograph—created her hand­made Pho­tographs of British Algae: Cyan­otype Impres­sions in 1843. And though the sub­ject may be less than thrilling, the images them­selves are aus­tere­ly beau­ti­ful.

Atkins 3

The sub­ti­tle of the book refers to the process Atkins used to make the images, a tech­nique devel­oped by Sir John Her­schel. “Ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phers,” writes Phil Edwards at Vox, “couldn’t eas­i­ly devel­op their pic­tures.” The tech­niques avail­able proved expen­sive, dan­ger­ous, and unsta­ble. “Her­schel came up with a solu­tion,” Edwards tells us, “using an iron pig­ment called ‘Pruss­ian Blue,’ he laid objects of pho­to­graph­ic neg­a­tives onto chem­i­cal­ly treat­ed paper, exposed them to sun­light for around 15 min­utes, and then washed the paper. The remain­ing image revealed pale blue objects on a dark blue back­ground.” The process, Jonathan Gibbs informs us at The Inde­pen­dent, “had pre­vi­ous­ly been used to repro­duce archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings and designs,” and is, in fact, the ori­gin of the word “blue­print.”

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Though “a capa­ble artist,” Edwards writes, Atkins real­ized that Herschel’s cyan­otypes “were a bet­ter way to cap­ture the intri­ca­cies of plant life and avoid the tedium—and error—involved with draw­ing.” British Algae, the BBC tells us, was Atkins’ “most valu­able work” as a nat­u­ral­ist. As the daugh­ter of a sci­en­tist and Roy­al Soci­ety Fel­low, Atkins had fre­quent con­tact with the most well-respect­ed sci­en­tists of the day, includ­ing Her­shel and pho­to­graph­ic pio­neer William Hen­ry Fox Tal­bot. Her “first con­tri­bu­tion to sci­ence was her engrav­ings of shells, used to illus­trate her father’s trans­la­tion of Lamarck’s Gen­era of Shells” in 1823. After­ward, she became inter­est­ed in botany, and algae in par­tic­u­lar, and in the emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy of pho­tog­ra­phy as a means of pre­serv­ing her obser­va­tions.

Atkins-5 (1)

Pho­tographs of British Algae was cir­cu­lat­ed pri­vate­ly, and Atkins “stopped pro­duc­ing it short­ly after her father died, though she con­tin­ued to make oth­er cyan­otype vol­umes, such as Cyan­otypes of British and For­eign Flow­er­ing Plants and Ferns in 1854. The first com­mer­cial­ly pub­lished book to use the cyan­otype tech­nique was Fox Tal­bot’s The Pen­cil of Nature in 1844. Yet, though Atkins may not have been well-known out­side her small cir­cle, nor her pub­li­ca­tion “regard­ed as a sem­i­nal work in botany,” she has received posthu­mous acclaim, includ­ing per­haps the ulti­mate mark of fame, a Google Doo­dle, in March of 2015 on her 216th birth­day. You can view and down­load in high res­o­lu­tion all of Atkins’ pio­neer­ing pho­to­graph­ic book at the New York Pub­lic Library’s exten­sive online archive — the same archive we fea­tured here yes­ter­day.

Atkins 6

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

See the First Known Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

Old Book Illus­tra­tions: Free Archive Lets You Down­load Beau­ti­ful Images From the Gold­en Age of Book Illus­tra­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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