Loading AI tools
British photographer (1799–1871) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anna Atkins (née Children; 16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871[1]) was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images.[2][3][4] Some sources say that she was the first woman to create a photograph.[3][4][5][6]
Anna Atkins | |
|---|---|
Atkins in 1861 | |
| Born | 16 March 1799 Tonbridge, Kent, England |
| Died | 9 June 1871 (aged 72) Halstead Place, Sevenoaks, Kent, England |
| Known for | Very early botanical photographs, 1843 book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1st book illustrated with photographic images) |
| Spouse |
John Pelly Atkins (m. 1825) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
|
Atkins was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England in 1799.[1] Her mother, Hester Anne Children, "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800.[5] Anna was close to her father John George Children, a renowned chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist.[7] Anna "received an unusually scientific education for a woman of her time."[8] Her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells.[8][9]
In 1825, she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, later sheriff, and proponent of railways; during this same year, she moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in Halstead, near Sevenoaks, Kent.[8][10] They had no children.[11] Atkins pursued her interests in botany by collecting dried plants, which were probably used as photograms later.[8] She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839.[12]
John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot.[8] Anna Atkins learned directly from Talbot about two of his inventions related to photography: the "photogenic drawing" technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper and exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotypes.[13][14]
Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841.[8] Some sources say that Atkins was the first female photographer,[3][4][5][6][15] while others attribute this title to Constance Fox Talbot.[16][17][18] As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins,[8] nor photographs by Constance Talbot,[17] survive, the issue may never be resolved.
Sir John Herschel, a friend of Atkins and Children, invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842.[1] Within a year, Atkins applied the process to algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype photograms that were contact printed[1] "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper".[5]
.jpg)
Atkins self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843.[2] She planned to provide illustrations to William Henry Harvey's A Manual of British Algae which had been published in 1841.[19] Although privately published, with a limited number of copies, and with handwritten text, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is considered the first book illustrated with photographic images.[2][3][4][20]
Eight months later, in June 1844, the first fascicle of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature was released; that book was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published"[21] or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs".[22]
Atkins produced a total of three volumes of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1853.[23] Only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, in various states of completeness.[24] Copies are now held by the following institutions, among others:[5][7]
One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for £133,500 at auction in 1996.[7][23] Another copy with 382 prints in two volumes which was owned by scientist Robert Hunt (1807–1887) sold for £229,250 at auction in 2004.[24]
In 2018, the New York Public Library opened an exhibition on Atkins' life and work, featuring various versions of Photographs of British Algae.[34][35]
In addition to Photographs of British Algae, Atkins published five novels between 1852 and 1863.[36][37] These included The Perils of Fashion, Murder will Out: a story of real life, and A Page from the Peerage.
In the 1850s, Atkins collaborated with Anne Dixon (1799–1864), who was "like a sister" to her, to produce at least three presentation albums of cyanotype photograms:[5]
Atkins retained the algae, ferns and other plants that she used in her work and in 1865 donated the collection to the British Museum.[38]
She died at Halstead Place in 1871 of "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" at the age of 72.[5]
On 16 March 2015, Internet search engine Google commemorated Atkins's 216th birthday by placing a Google Doodle image of bluish leaf shapes on a darker background on its search page to represent her cyanoprint work.[39][40]
Atkins' work was a major feature in the New Realities Photography in the Nineteenth Century exhibition held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June – September 2017.[41]
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.
