She only wanted to show what the seaweed really looked like. To do it she invented the photographic book.
In 1841 William Henry Harvey published A Manual of the British Algae, a catalogue of every seaweed known on British shores. It contained no pictures. This was the ordinary condition of botany: the things being described were fine, wet and branching, nearly impossible to draw and ruinously expensive to engrave, so the reader was handed words and left to imagine. Anna Atkins was forty-two, and one of the best scientific illustrators in England — as a young woman she had drawn some two hundred and fifty shells for her father's books. She decided the answer was not to draw them better.
Sir John Herschel, a friend of her father's, had found in 1842 that paper brushed with two iron salts turns Prussian blue in sunlight — except where something is lying on top of it. Atkins laid her dried algae straight onto the sheet and carried it out into the Kent daylight. What came back was not an artist's impression but the plant's own shadow, exact to the last filament. In October 1843 she began issuing Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions to her friends: the first book in the world illustrated with photographs, eight months ahead of Talbot's. She signed the plates only A.A.
Botanist, illustrator, printer of shadows
The lifeline
1799
Born at Tonbridge, Kent, on 16 March; her mother dies the following year
1823
At 24 her drawings illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells
1839
Elected to the Botanical Society of London — one of the few societies then admitting women
1843
October: Part I of British Algae — the first book illustrated with photographs
1853
Three volumes finished, ten years in the making, without a line of printed type
1871
Dies at Halstead Place, Kent, aged 72, largely unknown outside her circle
By the numbers
The measure of her
389
Plates in the Royal Society's copy — thought to be the book exactly as she intended it
8 months
She was ahead of Talbot's Pencil of Nature: October 1843 against June 1844
0
Words set in type. Every title, caption and note is a cyanotype of her own handwriting
17
Copies known to survive anywhere in the world, in varying states of completeness
What she made from sunlight and iron
The work
1823
Lamarck's Genera of Shells. Some 250 engravings, drawn by her, for the English edition her father produced — a full apprenticeship in rendering small wet things accurately.
Oct 1843
Photographs of British Algae, Part I. Privately issued to friends, never sold. Each image a contact print: the dried specimen laid on sensitised paper and left in the sun.
1843–1853
Three volumes, ten years. Every sheet coated, exposed, washed and dried by hand — and the text too, written out in her own hand on transparent paper and printed the same way.
1853
Memoir of J. G. Children. The life of her father — chemist, Secretary of the Royal Society, and the man who gave her a scientific education almost no Englishwoman of her generation received.
1853–1861
The Dixon albums. With her friend Anne Dixon, presentation books of ferns, flowering plants, feathers and needlework in cyanotype — the 1861 album alone holds 74 prints.
1865
She gives it all away. The algae and ferns she had spent decades pressing go to the British Museum — the physical specimens behind the blue.
A book made for friends, now kept in vaults
Recognition
In her lifetime
Published privately, in tiny numbers, for friends — never sold, never reviewed
Signed only A.A.; her name is nowhere on the title page
Her death record gives the cause as "paralysis, rheumatism, and exhaustion" — no profession worth noting
For a century the honour of the first photographic book went to Talbot
Today
Held by the British Library, the Royal Society, the Met, the Getty, the Rijksmuseum and Yale
A two-volume copy fetched £229,250 at auction in 2004
Larry Schaaf's Sun Gardens (1985) recovered her; the New York Public Library gave her a full exhibition in 2018
Google marked her 216th birthday in 2015 with a page of blue leaves
Where the blue was made
Halstead Place, Kent
Born at Tonbridge and motherless before she was one, she grew up in a house full of instruments — her father built one of the largest galvanic batteries in England. At twenty-six she married and moved to Halstead Place, near Sevenoaks, and stayed there forty-six years until she died in it. It is an inland house in the Kent weald, nowhere near a beach. The seaweed had to come to her: collected on the coast, dried, posted, pressed flat. Only the sunlight was local.
1799
Born at Tonbridge, Kent, on 16 March, to a chemist father and a mother she never knew
46
Years at Halstead Place, from her marriage in 1825 to her death in 1871
1865
Year her pressed algae and ferns went to the British Museum
"The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algae and Confervae, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel's beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves."
— Anna Atkins, preface to Photographs of British Algae, October 1843
