The History: A Woman, a Pioneer, and Prussian Blue
In the days of the first photographs, around 1839, pioneers of this field who integrated science and art began to emerge and take their place in the history of photography. During this era the thought of color photography in the contemporary sense was not even in the minds of the ingenious inventors.
However, one color did manage to make its mark through the hands of a woman born in 1799 named Anna Atkins. She is marked with being the first to publish a book of photographs and one of the first female photographers. [1]
Figure 1. Anna Atkins, Untitled, Cyanotype Photograms, 1843-1853, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
The vivid Prussian blue images that you see above are one of the 425 photographs published by Atkins. It is called a cyanotype. The name cyanotype was derived from the Greek word cyan, meaning “dark-blue impression”.