"SUMMER SELECTION"
With works Marina Berio, Jo Bradford, Ellen Carey, Susan Derges, Chuck Kelton, Mariah Robertson, Chloe Sells and Nancy Wilson-Pajic

Exhibition: 1 - 30 July 2022

Please note that the gallery will be exceptionally closed 12 - 16 July (public holiday week)

For the last exhibition before summer break, Miranda Salt, gallery director, proposes a selection from the gallery inventory with works by eight contemporary artists whose practise is influenced by the legcy of first woman photographer, Anna Atkins (1799-1871, English), amateur botanist and watercolorist who published in 1843 the first book to be illustrated by photographs, entitled Photographs of British Algae, cyanotype impressions. Atkins presented the algae like a herbarium and reproduced them as photograms in cyanotype. Each copy of Anna Atkins’ album is composed of more than four hundred plates, all made on chemically hand-prepared paper.

An only child, it was thanks to her father, chemist John George Children, that Atkins met William Henry Fox Talbot, also a botanist, and began experimenting with the silver salts process. For her publication, she adopted the 1842 invention of another friend, Sir John Herschel, the cyanotype (from the Greek, 'kyanos', or 'deep blue') that exploits the photosensitivity of ferric salts. In delicately annotating each plate by hand, Atkins is also the first photographer to combine text and image.

Today, Atkins’ photograms in cyanotype sit notably in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Royal Society in London, the Linnean Society, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In 2018, the New York Public Library produced an excellent exhibition Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, described as follows: In 1843 Anna Atkins began producing Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be printed and illustrated using photography. Today, 175 years later, her landmark project—compelling in its fusion of science and art, its modernity, and its realization by a woman in an age marked by the feats of men—remains a touchstone for viewers and makers alike. This exhibition brings together a diversity of works by 19 contemporary artists whose respective practices attest to the wide reach and generative nature of Atkins’s continuing legacy.

An excellent catalogue was produced for the occasion but is today out of print. To date, and despite the technical, scientific and artistic revolution of her work, there is still no comprehensive publication on Atkins’ life and work.

In the same spirit as the New York exhibition, the summer selection at Galerie Miranda is a tribute to this pioneering scientist and photographer and features figurative and abstract works by contemporary artists who have forged a unique path in photographic practice. For some of these artists, technical experimentation serves the 'meaning' of their work; for others, the process is the meaning. Exploring gum bichromate prints, blood prints, cyanotypes, luminograms, photograms, chemograms, manipulated and hand painted prints, these artists continue to develop new possibilities for photography today, dipping all the while into the long legacy of Anna Atkins.

Throughout the exhibition, the gallery will also propose for sale a new selection of unique platinum palladium still life works by contemporary French artist Philippe Grunchec, as well as selected first edition (1928) photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt.