Today’s post is about another woman you’ve almost certainly never heard of but definitely should have done. She was a botanist and  almost certainly  the world’s first female photographer, yet she didn’t use a camera to make her images because they’d hardly been invented.  Instead she found another way to produce hundreds of strikingly beautiful blue-and-white silhouettes of plants and seaweeds which she  used to create the first-ever “photographically” illustrated book in 1843.

Not long after her death in 1871, her work, signed A.A, was thought to be by an Anonymous Author, whereas in fact it stood  for  Anna Atkins.

Unless otherwise acknowledged all the images come from the copy of ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’ , in New York Public library  or Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns  in the Getty Collection, both of which are in the public domain.

Anna was born in 1799, into a comfortably-off  family who lived at Ferox Hall in Tonbridge. She was an only child and was bought up by her father, John Children, after her  mother died just months after giving birth to her.  Interested in all the natural sciences, but particularly chemistry,  John Children  spent much of his working life  at the British Museum rising eventually to be the first “Keeper of the Department of Natural History and Modern Curiosities”.

He was a friend and business partner of the chemist Humphrey Davey, helped establish the Zoological Club of the Linnaean Society in 1826, was first president of the Entomological Society in 1833, and   secretary of the Royal Society for several years. These  roles introduced him to  many of the leading intellectual figures of the day.

John  Children was very liberally minded and  thought that Anna should enjoy the same opportunities as any boy would have done so he encouraged her interests not only in the arts but the sciences too, notably botany. Over time this opened doors for Anna to participate in science in ways that would not have been possible for many women at that time. In particular she began to take an interest in, and collect seaweeds and other marine plants, which were then usually known by the term “algae”.  Maybe not the most exciting thing to the modern mind but as we’ll see quite spectacular in their own way.

Working alongside her father Anna became an accomplished illustrator and contributed more than over 250 scientifically accurate drawings to his 1823 translation of Jean Lamarck’s Genera of Shells.

In 1825 she married John Pelly Atkins, a well-to-do West India merchant, promoter of pneumatic railways and later sheriff of Kent. The couple lived at Halstead Place near Sevenoaks

In January 1839 her father was at a meeting of the Royal Society where Henry Fox Talbot read a paper entitled:  Some account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the Artist’s Pencil.”   He explained how by using certain chemicals and exposing them to sunlight he could create images on paper. Such  images are now known as photograms. Children told Anna about Talbot’s discovery and later wrote to him saying  “my daughter and I shall set to work in good earnest ’till we completely succeed in practising your invaluable process”.

Fox Talbot went on to publish The Pencil of Nature (1844–6) which he described in the preface as the “first attempt to publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing.”  It includes 24 photographic images, including one of a leaf, so that its often said that it was the first book illustrated with photographs but, in fact, as we’ll see,  Anna Atkins just managed to beat him to it. It does however remain the first commercially published book of that kind, although it was not a commercial success and Fox Talbot was forced to terminate the project after completing only six instalments.   His work was described by The Athenaeum magazine  as “modern necromancy” even though he explained that “the plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.”

As a natural history illustrator Anna could see  the potential of using Talbot’s ideas as a new way of recording specimens and she began experimenting with different chemicals and techniques.  Around the same time the first  commercially available camera was put on the market in France, and Anna was given one by her father in 1841. Given everything else we know about her I’m sure she experimented and put it to good use, but unfortunately none of any work she may have produced has survived.

At some point, perhaps through  her father, Anna met the polymath Sir John Herschel, who was another pioneer photographer, and who indeed had even invented  the word “photography” in 1839.   Herschel was busy working on refining and improving Fox Talbot’s processes for making photograms, and presented his findings in 3 different papers to the Royal Society. These outlined his many experiments and described the  final version, which  he called a cyanotype. To make a print, a specimen is placed directly onto  paper treated with  two chemical compounds, ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferricyanide, and then exposed to sunlight for between 10 and 40 minutes.

The chemical reactions involved  dyed the paper a vibrant Prussian blue, while  the outline of the object remained the colour of the paper, rather like a white shadow.   The image is fixed by putting the paper in a bath of distilled water with hydrogen peroxide.  Having tried this myself years ago watching the image emerge is quite something !

This process was to give rise to  the word “blueprint”.

The  one big advantage that Herschel’s discovery had over other early forms of photography is that the images created  were  far more stable and so did not fade away over time.    Anna saw the possibilities. Up until then  scientists relied on detailed descriptions and artistic illustrations or engravings to record the form and colour of botanical specimens  As she herself wrote to a friend ‘The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful proofs of cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves which … I hope … will be found sharp and well-defined.”

But it was more than merely allowing  specimens to effectively “illustrate” themselves, Cyanotypes not only  allowed her to show the delicate forms  of the specimens, but allowed her a degree of artistic licence in their arrangement on the page. Together this gives the images a timeless aesthetic appeal.

Once she’d mastered the basic technique she began a major project: the  first serious application of photography to science. She wrote to a friend:  “I have lately taken in hand a rather lengthy performance,” revealed Atkins. “It is the taking photographical impressions of all, that I can procure, of the British algae and confervae, many of which are so minute that accurate drawings of them are very difficult to make.” Most of the specimens came from her own extensive collection.  She was not alone in building such a collection as  trips to the coast in search of  seaweeds and other “ocean flowers” had become  a popular pastime among women of her class, although few were to take it to the lengths that Anna did.

She completed the first part of her project within about a year of Herschel’s papers. This was a very brief time-scale implying  an enormous investment of time and effort in such a meticulous task, especially getting the timing of  exposure to sunlight precisely right.

Anna may have decided to undertake this immense project because an encyclopaedic  new  work on seaweeds had just been published. William Henry Harvey’s Manual of British Algae appeared in 1841 but was completely lacking in any form of illustration, probably because of the great expense of commissioning engravings, but rendering it virtually useless to any but the most dedicated specialist.  She used his classifications to describe her specimens so in effect what she did was to provide a kind of illustrated supplement to the book.

Because each page  was individually “printed”  with considerable variation in both  colour and sharpness, each book was different. She even issued replacement plates if she later discovered what she thought a better specimen. The Latin identifications, contents pages and other text  were also handwritten by Anna  or constructed from small pieces of seaweed and turned into cyanotypes. She did virtually all the work herself although she may have had some basic assistance from household servants.

The results were stunning. Recent reviewers have commented  that “they are remarkably fresh [and]  surprisingly modern-looking: here a seahorse-like shape dominating the page, there a spiky snowflake. Elsewhere, feathery outlines and ghostly wisps of plant life.”

“The algae photograms appear not just in silhouette but also with some gradations of blue showing the thickness of the strands of seaweed, giving a diaphanous floating quality to the prints. You can almost smell the seawater.”

 

Furthermore because Herschel’s formula meant that images didn’t degrade with age or light the plates appear now almost exactly as they must have done when they were first printed and given to her friends.

The first parts were issued in October 1843 with the rest following in instalments over the following ten years.

The Natural History Museum estimates there were probably no more than 2o copies made altogether and that not all  have survived. They were  given to friends, including Herschel and Fox Talbot, as well as various institutions such as the Royal Society and the British Museum each of whom then bound the prints however they chose.

A year later she followed up her work on ferns with  Cyanotypes of British Flowering Plants and Foreign Ferns. Unfortunately there are no known extant copies of this.

The last recorded one was sold at auction in 1981 and then broken up and resold as individual plates.

Annabel Dover discussing one of them for her PhD thesis stumbled across the fact that no-one else seems to have noticed before.  She realised that Anna  did more  than just arrange the specimens because in attempting to replicate the plate of an  Iris, Dover found it was  both too bulky and dense to provide the frail veiny membrane captured by by the process. She thinks that  Anna must have pared the plant down until it was delicate enough to let a little light through and create the rather ghostly effect seen in the image.