Atkins, Anna (1797–1871)

English botanist and photographer who specialized in scientific illustration and was the first to produce a photographically illustrated book. Born Anna Children in 1797 in Tonbridge, England; died in 1871 in Halstead Place, England; daughter of John George Children (a zoologist and fellow and secretary of the Royal Society); married John Pelly Atkins (a railway promoter and owner of Jamaican coffee plantations), in 1825.

Anna Atkins, the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographs, worked closely with her father, zoologist John George Children, a respected scientist and longtime associate of the British Museum. She began her career in 1823 by producing drawings for his translation of Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet de Lamarck's, Genera of Shells.

It was after his retirement in 1840, however, that Children spent time with his daughter and her husband at their home in Kent, where he began to experiment with the mechanics of cyanotype or blueprinting that he had picked up from both the work of William Henry Fox Talbot on photogenic drawing, and his acquaintance with Sir John Herschel, the astronomer and scientist who had done pioneering work on the process as early as 1819. Atkins, in turn, refined the process and, in 1843, produced a study of algae titled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, containing her own original cyanotypes. In the introduction, she explained that she had used the new process because many of her specimens were so small that it was difficult to make accurate drawings of them.

Following her father's death in 1852, Atkins, possibly in collaboration with her friend Anne Dixon , produced Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1864), thus establishing herself in both the scientific and photographic communities and insuring a place in those fields for a generation of women to follow.

sources:

Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers.

Williams, Val. The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain 1900 to the Present. London, England: Virago Press, 1986.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts