GROUP EXHIBITION

Under a title borrowed (and slightly mistranslated) from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu Ingleby presents a series of interconnected images, posted daily in an exhibition that isn’t an exhibition.

The sequence began on Monday 13th April and will continue until the gallery is able to resume its normal programme, publishing a new work daily in a rolling sequence, with every selection being the work of an artist who has taken part in some aspect of the gallery’s more conventional exhibition programme over the past 22 years. It is in effect be a tribute to all of our favourite things.

The works appear each week day via our website and instagram and every Friday an email summarises the previous five days sequence, and releases a newly commissioned film from the studio of one of the artists featured that week. To subscribe to our weekly emails please join our mailing list here.

Part 29

From the work of a pioneering photographer of the present day, to one of the very first female practitioners of photography as a medium. Anna Atkins (1799-1871) trained as a botanist and first became interested in the possibilities of photography as a means of recording plant specimens for scientific reference. In doing so she became one of the very first women photographers of all time. She learned the principles of how to make a light-sensitive images from her correspondence with photography’s inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, and perfected the cyanotype method of photogenic drawing invented by a family friend Sir John Herschel.

We showed a few glorious examples of her work, including the peculiarly modern forms of Achrostium Simplex included here, in 2010 in A Little Bit of Magic Realised (a title taken from Fox Talbot’s 1839 description of his own newly invented medium) an exhibition which paired works by Atkins and Fox Talbot with two present day ‘camera-less’ photographers Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller.