Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Believed by some scholars to be the first woman to produce a photograph, Anna Atkins learned the cyanotype process from its inventor and family friend, Sir John Herschel. She envisioned this cameraless "photographic drawing" technique as an improved means of producing more accurate and less labor intensive illustrations for scientific reference books. Like her father, the British chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist John George Children, Atkins had an interest in science, particularly botany. Her area of specialty was British plants. She was introduced to William Henry Fox Talbot and Herschel—two of the early practitioners of photography—through her father, who had retired from the British Museum to live with his daughter in 1839, the same year that photography was introduced.
In 1843, Atkins published British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first scientific manual to be printed using photographic images to replace traditional typesetting and hand-drawn illustrations. Atkins turned to photography because, as she said, "the difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and Conferva, has induced me to avail myself to John Herschel's beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have pleasure in offering my botanical friends." This image is from a later publication on which she collaborated with another female botanist, Anne Dixon. The Sydney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has another plate from this book (Eskenazi Museum of Art 2019.7).