Anna Atkins is a female photography idol.

Not only was she a badass botanist, but she is also considered to be the first person to use photographs to illustrate a book. 

Born in Kent in 1799, Atkins grew up in a scientific family. Her father, John George Children, worked at the British Museum in the Department of Natural History and Modern Curiosities, so she understood the importance of documentation. She primarily worked as a botanist, collecting and cataloging plant life, but she used her father’s connections to the Royal Society to befriend artists and photographers like William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the founding fathers of photography, and Sir John Herschel, astronomer and inventor of the cyanotype process. Atkins is one of the best examples of someone who strides the line between artist and scientist, using research as the driving force behind her work.

At the time, drawing had been the primary means of recording and communicating visual scientific information via illustrations, diagrams, and labels. But as Atkins studied the various species of algae for a book about the types found in Britain, she found that drawing the intricacies of the smaller varieties was difficult. Working with Herschel, she discovered that creating sunprints using the cyanotype process was the perfect solution. Photographs were not quite as we know them today but were a series of explorations in light permanence. Scientists and artists were attempting to capture and keep impressions of light as a record of time. The cyanotype process, a mixture of ferricyanide and iron salts that create a deep blue hue when reacting with light, was one of the first successes in this adventure, and the first installment of her book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, was published in 1843. Full of arresting blue and white photos of pressed plant matter, the book has both scientific and aesthetic merit.

During this era, women were seldom able to make photography their primary career unless their family was on the wealthy side, like that of the Pre-Raphaelite Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.  Like Cameron, Atkins was able to dedicate her time to these prints and processes, and went on to explore further plants and objects in other monographs. Atkins passed away in 1871. While the idea of female photographers is not a new one today, Atkins was largely left out of photographic history until the 1990s. Her initials on the prints, A.A., were thought by at least one collector to stand for “Anonymous Amateur,” a low blow for the first published photographer. No longer anonymous, we can rightly give credit to Atkins for her trailblazing.