Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins, née Children (16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871), was an English botanist and photographer. She is the first person to have produced a book illustrated with photographic images, British Algae, published in parts from 1843 to 1853.^[1]

Anna was born in Tonbridge, Kent, to the scientist and polymath John George Children and his wife Hester Anne, who died shortly after the birth. Under her father’s tuition she became interested in biology, and her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells.^[2]

In 1825 Anna married John Pelly Atkins, the son of the Lord Mayor of London. In 1839 she met the inventor and photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot at a congress of the Royal Society, at which he was presenting his camera-less “photogenic drawings”.^[a]Photogenic drawing is a technique in which an object is placed on light-sensitised paper and exposed to sunlight to produce an image.^[3] Soon afterwards she met the astronomer Sir John Herschel, who developed another camera-less photographic process, the cyanotype.^[2] The process takes advantage of the effect of sunlight on certain compounds of iron, which after exposure produce a blue image on light-sensitised paper. Thus exposed areas of the paper are turned blue, while those hidden by whatever is laid on top remain white.^[4]

Anna and a friend had been collecting seaweed for many years, and Anna enthusiastically embraced the cyanotype. Painting the solution of light-sensitive iron compounds onto paper, she set about photographing her collection, resulting in the publication of the first volume of British Algae in 1843.^[2] After the death of her father in 1853, Anna and her close friend and fellow photography enthusiast, Ann Dixon, produced an album of cyanotypes of ferns, Cyanotypes of British And Foreign Ferns.^[5]