Sarah Grew

Portraits of Pacific Plankton

This project, 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.

We start in 1843 with the first book ever printed photographically. That book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, also holds the honor of being by the woman credited with being the first woman photographer, Anna Atkins.

In order to address both my concern for climate change and the prominence of women in the struggle, my work honors Anna Atkins’ achievement. My plankton photographs use the same format (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 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.

Several interviews and more information can be found on my news page