Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins (; 16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871 ) was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources say that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

Early life Atkins was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England in 1799. Anna "received an unusually scientific education for a woman of her time." Her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells.

In 1825, she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, later Sheriff of Kent, and proponent of railways; during this same year, she moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in Halstead, near Sevenoaks, Kent. They had no children. Atkins pursued her interests in botany by collecting dried plants, which were probably used as photograms later.

Photography John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot.

Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. while others attribute this title to Constance Fox Talbot. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins,

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" or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs".

Atkins produced a total of three volumes of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1853. Only 17 copies of the book are known to exist, in various states of completeness. Copies are now held by the following institutions, among others: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. New York Public Library, which provides scans of 285 pages of its copy online. The Royal Society, London, whose copy with 403 pages and 389 plates is thought to be the only existing copy of the book as Atkins intended. There are 403 pages available online; the digitized images do not include text or title pages, only plates. The Natural History Museum in London. They have digitized and uploaded 424 pages from all three volumes. The Linnean Society of London, described as "3 volumes, [162, 152, 99] plates", and whose copy lacks part 7 of volume 1. The Horniman Museum and Gardens holds a particularly complete copy with 14 pages of text and 443 plates. She provided plates with additional images of the same species when she found a better example, and these duplicates have been retained in this copy. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Université de Montréal, Montreal . This copy appears to have beenhe possession of Herschel. The three volumes were bound into one, with all contents lists, appendix list, and errata list at the front. It is 463 images including a later note from the time of the binding.

One copy of the book with 411 plates in three volumes sold for £133,500 at auction in 1996.

Later life and work

She has also been credited with writing some anonymous novels , but this has now been disproved.

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:

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, holds a number of original works in their library - large plates not from Photographs of British Algae.

Atkins retained the algae, ferns and other plants that she used in her work and in 1865 donated the collection to the British Museum.

She died at Halstead Place in 1871 of "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" at the age of 72.

Atkins' work was a major feature in the New Realities Photography in the Nineteenth Century exhibition held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June – September 2017.

Poet Jessy Randall included a tribute to Atkins in her 2025 collection of poems about women scientists, The Path of Most Resistance.

Publications