Tracey Thorne
PhD Artist Research - Work in Progress
Thesis Title: Jamaica of the Mind: Decolonizing the Works and Legacy of Anna Atkins
A Jamaica of the Mind is a practice-based PhD that uses contemporary photography and cyanotype to re-examine the nineteenth-century botanical photograms of Anna Atkins and her legacy. The research centres on a micro-series of cyanotype plates of Jamaican fern specimens, generally attributed to Atkins and her close collaborator Anne Dixon, made between 1853 and 1854. Today, these rare plates are held in Western institutions and private art collections, permanently separated from Jamaica. Atkins’ extensive body of work is typically encountered as aesthetic or scientific objects, whilst the colonial contexts of the foreign ferns and flowers plates are rarely discussed.
The research argues that existing scholarship on Atkins remains shaped by Western epistemologies that have prioritised romanticised and aestheticised readings of her practice, rooted in imperial systems of knowledge. This has produced a sustained silence. Art and photographic histories have consistently detached her cyanotypes from the social and economic conditions of empire that shaped their creation. Insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to archival records that evidence the Atkins family as direct beneficiaries of African transatlantic chattel slavery in Jamaica. My research considers how this absence has constrained scholarly understanding of her practice and the imperial conditions under which the foreign fern plates were made. The micro-series of Jamaican fern plates has remained largely uninterpreted within her wider body of work, which dates to 1843, a silence the research treats as itself historically significant.
Through archival research, critical autoethnography, and collaborative cyanotype practice in the UK and Jamaica, the research retraces former Atkins family plantation sites in the Blue Mountain region, re-situating these images within their ecological, cultural, and historical contexts. At these sites, an experimental cyanotype practice will use coffee, cinchona and plantation-connected materials as deliberate disrupting agents, shifting the blue of Atkins's photograms through materials drawn from the post-colonial landscapes from which her specimens were taken.
The research asks: how can contemporary photographic practice be used to decolonise and re-see Atkins's botanical cyanotypes; and how can a decolonial visual methodology re-situate her Jamaican photograms beyond their inherited colonial epistemologies.
Video of a collection of photograms of Jamaican ferns held in the J.P Getty Museum, c1853, A Atkins & A Dixon
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Photograph: A Copy List of Enslaved People at Mount Hybla who were sold to
John Atkins, (U969/Kent Archives)
(2025) Tracey Thorne
Archival record, Kent Archives. A return of enslaved African people from Mount Hybla Plantation, in the Parish of Port Royal, Jamaica, 1820, owned by Samuel Whitmore Barnett. This document was among the records for the sale of people from the enslaver Whitmore to John Atkins of Kent, who purchased Mount Hybla in Jamaica. It records the Christian name of each of the 188 people, their assigned occupation, and their value in British pounds. The first entry is for Cook, a male, Driver, worth £195. This document helps us learn more about the people who lived at Mount Hybla, and how these fragmented stories might enable us to understand more widely the relationship between this community in Jamaica and Britain, and their connection to Anna Atkins. Shown alongside her work, it invites us to think about the colonial legacies embedded in her photograms.
This plantation estate and the wealth derived from it, and others in Jamaica, were inherited in 1838 by John Pelly Atkins - Anna's husband. John also inherited the great mansion at Halsead Place in Kent, where he and Anna lived for the rest of their lives. This was also the site of her practice - and where she made her cyanotypes from 1842.
Photograph: Extract from a Return of Slaves at Mount Hybla, Port Royal, who were sold to John Atkins of Kent (U969/Kent Archives)
(2025) Tracey Thorne
Anna Atkins Selected Biography
Anna Atkins (born Anna Children, 1799, Tonbridge, Kent – died 1871, Halstead, Kent) was the daughter of John George Children, a chemist, mineralogist, and senior figure within British scientific institutions, including the Royal Society and the British Museum. Following the death of her mother shortly after her birth, she was raised largely within her father’s intellectual and social milieu, receiving an unusual, informal education.
In 1825, Anna married John Pelly Atkins of Kent. Through this marriage, her adult life became situated within the Atkins family, whose wealth and social standing were grounded in Atlantic commerce, land ownership, and imperial finance. Archival records demonstrate that members of her immediate family network, including her father-in-law, John Alderman Atkins and her husband, John Pelly Atkins, were directly involved in transatlantic chattel slavery. The family held plantation interests in Jamaica and were beneficiaries of compensation paid following the abolition of slavery in the British colonies.
This positioning placed Atkins within elite social, scientific, and cultural networks materially sustained by the profits and afterlives of slavery. Wealth generated through enslaved labour circulated back to Britain, flowing into Kent and London through property ownership, financial investment, and institutional participation. These imperial conditions formed part of the material and social environment within which her cyanotype practice developed.
During her lifetime, Atkins was not publicly recognised as an artist, botanist, or photographer. Her cyanotype volumes circulated privately within small, elite scientific and social networks and attracted limited contemporary attention. In 1865, she donated her herbarium, the collection of dried plant specimens she had assembled over decades, to the British Museum, where her father had been professionally active for many years.
Atkins’s principal cyanotype works include:
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Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853)
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Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853)
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Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854)
The fern albums represent a shift in Atkins's practice away from algae, though their authorship is complicated. In the absence of extant written evidence, scholars generally assume the work was made collaboratively with Anne Dixon. Two albums are known to exist, held at the Getty Museum in the US and the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. With a third album, gifted by Atkins, having been sold at private auction in the 1980s and broken up, its plates now dispersed across collections, including the Getty, MoMA, as well as other institutions and private collections, selling at auction for thousands. The Jamaican plates sit within a broader set of colonial specimens from multiple territories, each mounted on paper with Atkins's signature verso. Some of these plates can be accessed online, such as MOMA's plate - Pteris Rotundifolia (Jamaica) from the album Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Plants and Ferns, 1853. These reveal that some of the same specimens were used in all three albums.
Her posthumous reputation developed much later, particularly in the twentieth century, when artists and historians rediscovered the cyanotype process and began reassessing early photographic practices. This reassessment intensified in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as digitisation and online image circulation brought her work into global view. In the digital era, repeated reproduction of her plates helped consolidate her reputation as a pioneering figure, an identity constructed retrospectively rather than claimed in her own lifetime.
Today, Atkins is frequently described as a British botanist and early woman photographer and is credited with producing the first photographically illustrated book using the cyanotype process invented by John Herschel in 1842.
My research on Atkins and the connections to Jamaica is a work in progress.
Research news and updates are available here
Tracey Thorne
PhD research 2025 - in progress
Institute of Photography at the University of Falmouth, Cornwall
Cyanotype images shown above are from the Getty Collection
from the album British and Foreign Ferns (Atkins/Dixon, 1853, object 84.XO.227)