Anna Atkins

Atkins, Anna (née Children; 1799-1871), English botanist and pioneer of the photogram and photographic publishing. Daughter of the prominent scientist John George Children, Atkins was encouraged by him in her scientific interests. She was a competent watercolourist and published at least one lithograph. By 1823 her draughtsmanship and observational skills were refined enough for her to produce 200 illustrations for her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells. Botany was her particular love, especially the collection and study of seaweeds. Her father chaired the February 1839 Royal Society meeting at which Henry Talbot first revealed the manipulatory secrets of photogenic drawing. Father and daughter soon got a camera and took up the new art of photography, but Atkins's biggest contribution to it involved neither a camera nor her father. She conceived the idea of publishing a photographic record of her algae, making photograms by contact printing the dried specimens on sheets of sensitized paper. Her choice of Sir John Herschel's cyanotype process was brilliant. Iron based, inexpensive, and permanent, its characteristic blue colour proved ideal as a background for the ‘flowers of the sea’. Starting in October 1843 (the year before Talbot's Pencil of Nature), Atkins privately published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. When this part-book was completed in September 1853, it contained more than 400 photographic plates, each a hand-sensitized cyanotype negative. Atkins continued to make cyanotype photograms, increasingly as an art from employing varied natural objects.

— Larry J. Schaaf

Bibliography

• Schaaf, L. J., Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins (1985)

A cyanotype photogram made by Atkins which was part of her 1843 book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

An example of Atkins' work, from her 1854 book, of Wood Horsetail

Anna Atkins (née Children) (1799-1871) was an English botanist, photographer, and the first person to publish a book illustrated exclusively with photographic images.^[1]

Early life

Anna Atkins was born in Tonbridge, Kent, and her mother died in childbirth.^[2] Her father, John George Children, was a scientist of many interests who was honored by having the mineral childrenite and the Children's python, Antaresia childreni, named after him.

Photography

Sir John Herschel, a friend of Atkins and her father, invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842. Within a year, Atkins applied the process to solve the difficulties of making accurate drawings of scientific specimens and self published the first installment of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Only about twelve copies of the book were made, one of which is held in the National Media Museum in Bradford, England. She continued to publish other installments of the British Algae series, and also to make other books like Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854).

References

1. ^ The New York Public Library. "Seeing is Believing". Retrieved on 2006-12-23. .
2. ^ Marshall, Peter. "The Pencil of Nature", About.com. Retrieved on 2006-12-23. .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Anna Atkins

• New York Public Library
• Getty museum
• About.com
• Anna Atkins Cyanotype Photogenic Drawings and Photograms

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