Portraits of Pacific Plankton: Cyanotype Impressions

This project honors the history of photography and examines climate change on the zooplankton food web. It was created aboard the RV Atlantis on the Pacific ocean.

Portraits of Pacific Plankton: Cyanotype Impressions grew out of a desire to speak to one of the burning issues of our lives, climate change, and to reflect on both the ways our society has changed and how it has remained the same through the advances of technology that have led us to the present.

To weave the history of science and photography into the complexity of climate change, we start in 1842 four years after photography is patented. This is when the woman credited with being the first woman photographer publishes the first book produced photographically. The book is titled, Photographs of British Algae; Cyanotype Impressions, and the photographer is Anna Atkins. Ironically, Atkins has only recently been recognized for her innovative work. Now, 176 years later, my project honors Anna Atkins’ achievement.

As the artist in residence on a science research vessel off the Pacific coast, I worked with several teams of scientists as they studied the effects of climate change on the zooplankton food-web. On the boat, we used a specialized underwater imaging system called an In-Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System, ISIIS, which captures the shadow of anything that crosses in its light at a rate of 90 frames a second. My resulting plankton photographs are printed in the same format as Anna Aktins (8”x 10”), the same printing technique (cyanotype on watercolor paper), and like her work, mine is a compendium of various species. These similarities are combined with the great advances in technology that have been made since her time; digital capture, underwater photography, and photo-microscopy, to create images that meld time and space. When Anna Atkins was making her cyanotypes, the importance of the zooplankton food-web was fairly unimaginable as was the climate change that is visible through changes in that food- web. This project, thus, not only reawakens the excitement of the age of discovery but speaks to the current fragility of our planet. The collection presented here are just a few from this art/science collaboration and form the beginnings of a trans- temporal and transcontinental dialog that will become a book, Portraits of Pacific Plankton: Cyanotype Impressions.