Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) grew up in a house full of science. Her father, John George Children, was a chemist, mineralogist, and fellow of the Royal Society. Children gave his daughter, who had lost her mother in infancy, an unusually expansive education for a woman of her time. By the time she was an adult, Atkins was already contributing to serious scientific work, producing meticulous engravings of shells for her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells in 1823. She was a naturalist before she was a photographer, and a scientist before the word was given to women.

In 1839, the announcement of photography sent ripples through scientific circles across Europe. Atkins, well-connected through her father and her husband, found herself close to the action: she knew William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium's pioneers, and Sir John Herschel, who invented the cyanotype process - the method that would define her life's work.

The cyanotype was elegant in its simplicity. Treat paper with two iron salts, lay your subject directly on top, expose it to sunlight, rinse it in water, and the image appears: white forms on a deep, luminous blue. Atkins immediately recognized what it could do for botany.

In October 1843, she published the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions quietly and without fanfare, distributing handwritten copies to a small circle of botanical friends. It was one of the first books in history to be illustrated with photographic images. William Henry Fox Talbot's commercially produced, and far more celebrated, Pencil of Nature followed eight months later. Though it went unrecognized at the time, Atkins had beaten him to it, armed with seaweed and sunlight.

Although artistic expression was not her primary goal, Atkins brought real care and sensitivity to her early subjects, arranging them in imaginative and elegant compositions. Each specimen was collected, rinsed, pressed, and dried by Atkins herself. The resulting white silhouettes, drifting against that unmistakable Prussian blue, were at once scientifically precise and quietly beautiful.

Later, she would be joined in her work by a childhood friend named Anne Dixon. The two were, in Atkins' own words, like sisters. Dixon, who had lost her own mother at a young age and whose father was posted overseas, was largely raised in the Children household. They were born the same year, 1799, and moved through the world together. In the 1850s, they collaborated on two further books of cyanotypes - Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853) and Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854). Dixon collected specimens, helped print, and shaped the work in ways that have largely gone unrecorded. History kept Anna Atkins; it mostly forgot Anne Dixon.

History was slow to acknowledge Atkins properly, though. For much of the twentieth century, her contribution to photography was either overlooked or attributed to others. She has since been recognized as a pioneer; her cyanotypes are now held by the British Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. 

The images she made in a decade of quiet, methodical work are among the earliest photographs in existence.