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= Anna Atkins = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anna Atkins (née Children; 16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871) was a botanist and photographer native to England. She is recalled as the creator of the first book to be illustrated and printed through photographic processes. Some regard her as the earliest female photographer  ; the making of her images, cyanotypes by process and materiality, did not involve the use of a camera.

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Early life[edit]
A town in Southeast England named Tonbridge, Kent became the birthplace of Anna Atkins in 1799. Her mother, Hester Anne Children, "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800. This loss drew her emotionally close to her father, John George Children, who was an investigator of astronomy, chemistry, electricity, entomology, mineralogy, and zoology. Notably, he constructed a laboratory within their home. Anna was born into a family of wealth.

Through involvement in her father's academic activities, Anna received an education whose quality was rare for a female of this period. Holding positions such as fellow of the Royal Society, assistant librarian at the British Museum, and president of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Children was a catalyst for Atkins' scientific endeavors; he introduced her to esteemed colleagues, allowed her to read scientific papers acquired by him, and recounted what he absorbed during lectures to her. Her father frequently was the one to transmit information regarding Anna through his correspondence, which is thought to elucidate why her self-inscribed record is limited.

When her father translated Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Genera of Shells into English, Anna was asked to create naturalistic drawings meant to aid readers in their identification of specimens - depictions that would subsequently be adapted by an engraver for the purposes of printing. These shell illustrations, amounting to 256 images defined by their scientific integrity, were rendered with graphite and watercolor between 1822 and 1824.

In 1825, she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, county sheriff, and proponent of railways; during this same year, she moved to Halstead Place (the Atkins family home near Sevenoaks, Kent). They had no children. Later in life, having been painting them for decades, Anna gifted her husband a set of watercolor landscapes.

Atkins pursued her interests in botany during her twenties by keeping a collection of dried plants, also known as an herbarium - ones which were likely used later for photograms. With those she gathered and those lent by friends, she engaged in a practice of preserving specimens with the assistance of a flower press. She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839, an institution which was distinct in its inclusion of women in scientific spheres during this part of history.

Development of a Photographic Practice[edit]
Anna Atkins emerged as a photographer during the Victorian era, a period of scientific fascination and of gender-based hierarchy described by the "doctrine of separate spheres".

John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot. Children was the secretary at an 1839 Royal Society meeting in which Talbot explained his newfound iteration on the "photogenic drawing" technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper and exposed to the sun to produce an image). At first through her father, Anna learned from Talbot about this aforementioned technique, as well as its refined version, the calotype - rather than their bond being one of competition, it is believed that she shared his "excitement of the potential of photography on paper".

Anna was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer,   while others attribute this title to Constance Fox Talbot.

In 1842, a companion of Atkins and Children named Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype photographic process. Within a year, Atkins applied the process to algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype photograms that were contact printed "by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper". It may be noted that this process gave way to relatively "permanent" and "'accurate'" botanical images.

Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions[edit]


Through application of algae garnered along the coast of Great Britain, Atkins self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843. At first, Anna's projection was for her illustrations to serve as a complementary work when paired with William Harvey’s Manual of British Algae (1841); the two volumes did not maintain this preconceived relationship, however the manual was essential to Anna as a reference for nomenclature. Significant to the contents of this work, the specimens were identified by their scientific names in Latin. Along with the aid of servants, the entire set of books took approximately ten years to produce; subscribers themselves sewed the fascicles together gradually, as the component pages were sent individually upon completion.

Although privately published, with handwritten text and a limited number of copies, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is considered the first book illustrated with photographic images. Prior to this point, it was typesetting and non-photographic illustration that enabled the publication of manuals; Atkins's novel production contributed to the pursuit of studying the sciences by way of replicable visuals. Applying the freedoms of her chosen method, Atkins composed the characters of select titles in British Algae with strands of seaweed.

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". During the process of crafting and distributing their books, Atkins and Talbot exchanged fragments of these two works.

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:


 * British Library, London, which provides scans of 429 pages of its copy (which has extra plates) online. She presented these volumes to the British Museum via J. E. Gray between 1843 and 1853.
 * 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.
 * The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, holds a number of original works in their library.
 * The Linnean Society of London, 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

As an effect of the book's rarity and historical importance, a single copy with 411 plates in three volumes sold for £133,500 at auction in 1996. 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.

Later life and work[edit]
Disagreement exists in the crediting of Anna Atkins to the publication of five novels between 1852 and 1863. Those in question include The Perils of Fashion, The Colonel: a story of fashionable life, Murder will Out: a story of real life, and A Page from the Peerage. Scholar Larry Schaaf illuminates the source of these attributions as cataloguing by the then British Museum; he implies that there is a lack of evidence supporting her association to these works.

Anna's father died on 1 January 1852. Signed A.A. at its private printing during 1853, Memoir of J.G. Children, Esq. (Including Some Unpublished Poetry by Father and Himself) chronicled the life of her father.

In the 1850s, Atkins collaborated with Anne Dixon (1799–1877) - an "almost sister" to Anna and a cousin to novelist Jane Austen - in botanical and artistic pursuits. Friends since childhood, Dixon was a consoling force towards Anna when her father died in 1852; during the summer of that year, the two collected and made sun prints of organic specimens. Together, they produced at least three presentation albums of cyanotype photograms:


 * Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853), now in the J. Paul Getty Museum;
 * Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns (1854), disassembled pages of which are held by various museums and collectors;
 * An album inscribed to "Captain Henry Dixon," Anne Dixon's nephew (1861).

Algae, lace, ferns, feathers, and waterweeds in part constitute the imagery that Atkins documented through the cyanotype process during her life. Atkins retained the plant specimens that she used in her work and in 1865 donated the collection to the British Museum.

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

Presence in Popular Culture and Modern Art [edit]
On 16 March 2015, internet search engine Google commemorated Atkins's 216th birthday by insetting a Google Doodle on its search page that was representative of her cyanotype contributions - visually, it involved pale leaves (approximating the letter shapes of the company's name) surrounded by characteristically blue negative space.

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

Additionally, the reverberations of Atkins's work were clear at the New York Public Library (NYPL) in a set of companion exhibitions. One, Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins, was on view from October 19th, 2018 to February 17th, 2019. The other, Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, was open from September 28th, 2018 to January 6th, 2019; remarking upon Atkins's enduring effect on the nature of artistic practice, it featured the visual work of nineteen creatives.

The Bluest of Blues: Anna Atkins and The First Book of Photographs by Fiona Robinson, a picture book biography, was published by Abrams Books for Young Readers on February 12th, 2019. Robinson's illustrated text is accompanied by Atkins's cyanotypes in this biography, whose subject is described by Kirkus Reviews as "a pioneering woman whose intellectual passions culminated in published works of beauty and scientific verisimilitude".

Critical and Scholarly Perspectives [edit]
Although in the past mainstream photographic historians have been sparse in their scholarship devoted to her, increasing attention towards and publication about Atkins have been noted.

In an 1848 edition of the Art-Union, photographic historian and researcher Robert Hunt expressed his reception of "specimens of the British Algae executed by a lady, by the cyanotype process, that are remarkable for the extreme fidelity with which even the most attenuated tendrils of the marine plants are copied".

Larry Schaaf, scholar of photography, emphasized the "democratizing effect" of photography that Atkins's British Algae foretold - as well as how it speaks to its creator's "imagination and perseverance".

Within Anna Atkins: Photographs of British Algae, curator Hope Saska observes the reciprocity across disciplines that this work evokes; noting that her "contributions to botanical illustration and photographic publishing...are remarkable", Saska illuminates the potential for conversation between "the fine arts, natural sciences, and early photography" in the presence of this book.

Bibliography[edit]

 * Atkins, Anna (2020) [1843]. Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (Sir John Herschel's Copy). Gerhard Steidl Druckerei und Verlag. ISBN
 * (1853). Memoir of J. C. Children, including some unpublished poetry by his father and himself. London: John Bowye Nichols and Sons. OCLC

See also[edit]

 * Timeline of women in science

References

Further reading[edit]

 * Armstrong, Carol; Catherine de Zegher (2004). Ocean flowers: impressions from nature . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11948-1
 * Gerhard Bissell, Atkins, Anna, in: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon(Artists of the World), Suppl. I, Saur, Munich 2005, from p. 514 (in German).
 * Schaaf, Larry (1985). Sun gardens : Victorian photograms . New York: Aperture. ISBN 089381203X
 * Schaaf, Larry (2018). Sun gardens : cyanotypes by Anna Atkins . New York: New York Public Library. ISBN 9783791357980

External links[edit]

 * "Anna Atkins". J. Paul Getty Museum. Retrieved 11 August 2009.
 * "Anna Atkins's 216th Birthday". Google Doodles Archive. Retrieved 16 March 2015.
 * Rudnick, Les. "The photogram - a history. Photographic adventures in the creation of photogram images in the early 1800s". Retrieved 11 August 2009.
 * Scans of Photographs of British algae: cyanotype impressions at New York Public Library (public domain). Retrieved 6 January 2016.
 * Anna Atkins Collection Items [1 ] at Victoria and Albert Museum