PhD ARTIST RESEARCH | Jamaica of the Mind Anna Atkins

PhD Artist Research

Thesis Title: Jamaica of the Mind: Decolonizing the Works and Legacy of Anna Atkins

Jamaica of the Mind is a practice-based PhD using photography and cyanotype to re-examine Anna Atkins’ nineteenth-century cyanotype works and legagcy using contemporary photographic and decolonial visual methodologies. The research focuses on the foreign fern photogram plates produced between 1853 and 1854. It centres on a micro-series of photograms of Jamaican fern specimens, generally attributed to Anna Atkins and her close collaborator Anne Dixon. Today, these rare plates are held in Western institutional and private art collections, where they are typically encountered as aesthetic or scientific objects, detached from their colonial contexts.

I will examine why these plates have remained largely uninterpreted within Atkins’s wider body of work. I consider how imperial systems of knowledge shaped what was made visible and what was silenced, and how art and photographic histories have often detached her cyanotypes from the social and economic conditions of empire that shaped their creation, including the Atkins family’s involvement in slavery and plantation economies in Jamaica.

Through archival research, visual ethnography, and collaborative cyanotype practice in the UK and Jamaica, the research seeks to re-situate these images within their ecological, cultural, and historical contexts, opening new ways of seeing Atkins’ work beyond inherited colonial frameworks.

Anna Atkins 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 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:

Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853)
Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1850s)
Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854)

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 work in progress.

Tracey Thorne

PhD research 2025 - in progress

Institute of Photography at the University of Falmouth, Cornwall

Images shown above are from the J P. Getty Collection from the album British and Foriegn Ferns (1853, object 84.XO.227)