Anna atkins photography biography

Early Life, Early Photography

John George Children and Hester Anne Children gave birth to their only daughter, Anna, in Kent, England in 1799. Hester passed away shortly afterwards. Daughter and father would maintain an especially close relationship throughout their lives. John Children was a respected chemist and zoologist, and the first president of the Royal Entomological Society. He was also secretary of the Royal Society, a longstanding fellowship of preeminent scientists of various disciplines, first formed in 1660. Due to her father’s personal tutelage and professional connections, Anna Atkins (née Children) was exposed to art and natural science from a young age.

By her twenties, Atkins was a skilled illustrator and demonstrated an affinity for carefully representing the subtleties of natural forms. She completed hundreds of drawings of shells for an 1822 encyclopedia. In the years to come, new innovations in imaging technologies would push Atkins beyond pencils and paper. William Henry Fox Talbot, the British inventor of photography, was a friend of Atkins’s. In 1834, unaware of what was happening in France, Fox Talbot devised a way to fix images on paper using light-sensitive chemicals. Talbot’s announcement of a negative-positive photography process that he called the calotype came just two weeks after Louis Daguerre’s announcement of the daguerreotype. Both of these inventions sparked a series of developments in imagemaking that informed the film photography processes we know today.

From Camera to Cyanotype

British photographer (1799–1871)

Anna Atkins (née Children; 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. Her mother, Hester Anne Children, "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800. Anna was close to her father John George Children, a renowned chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist. 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, 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. She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839.

Photography

John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends

Anna Atkins was a botanist and a pioneer in the history of photography and illustrated publications. Doubly privileged by birth and social background, she was the only child of eminent chemist, mineralogist and zoologist John George Children, who provided her with a thorough education and introduced her to the scientific circles of the time. Her talent as a draughtswoman led her to illustrate her father’s 1823 English translation of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. Both her marriage in 1825 to John Pelly Atkins, a wealthy merchant and landowner who was also interested in science, and the fact that they had no children, were also circumstances that helped A. Atkins remain invested in botany – one of the rare scientific fields relatively open to women of the British polite society. In the mid-1830s she started to put together a herbarium (after adding to it for thirty years, Atkins donated it to the British Museum in 1865). In 1839 she was elected a member of the London Botanical Society, where her father then served as vice-president. He was also a member of the Royal Society, where William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) caused a sensation that same year with his invention of paper photography. W. H. F. Talbot and J. G. Children would maintain scientific exchanges on the subject, as they had in the case of many others throughout the years. This is how A. Atkins, who herself had direct contact with the inventor, became one of the first women practitioners of paper photography.

From then on, she would move away from drawing and use photography to document her collection of algae, driven by the promise of saving time and, more importantly, increased precision in her scientific descriptions. While she did own a camera as from the autumn 1841, she favoured the photogram technique instead for this specific purpose. Using this primitive method of cameraless photography developed by W. H. F. Talbot, who called it “photogenic draw

Anna Atkins was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.

Atkins was born in Tunbridge, Kent, England in 1799. Her mother, Hester Anne Children, "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800. Anna was close to her father John George Children, a renowned chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist. 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, and 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. She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839.

John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot. Anna Atkins learned directly from Talbot about two of his inventions related to photography: the "photogenic drawing" technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper which is exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotypes.

Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer. Other sources name Constance Fox Talbot as the first female photographer. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins nor any photographs by Constance Talbot survive, the issue may never be resolved.

Sir John Herschel, a friend of Atkins and Children, invented the cyanotype