Anna Atkins Made the First Book of Photographs

 

                       

                        Detail of Rhodomenia sobolifera from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, ca. 1843–53

In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves.

In the preface to his 1844 book, The Pencil of Nature, English inventor Henry Fox Talbot described his “little work” as the “first attempt to publish a series of plates or pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing.” Talbot had grandiose ambitions for the future of photography — a medium he had played a role in creating — but this experimentation was already well under way. He was not, as he claimed, the first person to publish a book of photographic prints. That distinction belongs to an amateur botanist named Anna Atkins.

Starting in the early 1840s, Atkins created hundreds of cyanotypes, a photographic process in which paper is treated with a chemical solution before being exposed to sunlight. When objects are left on the treated paper — British ocean plants, in Atkins’ case — over time they produce a white silhouette against an inky blue ground. Bound together, Atkins’ images served as an illustrated supplement to the phycologist William Henry Harvey’s Manual of British Algae (1841). This arrangement was typical at the time, when printing text and images in a single book would have been prohibitively expensive. Indeed, in this and many other ways, Atkins’ work assumed the standard conventions of botanical illustration, and were it not for her use of the novel medium, British Algae would have most likely been forgotten to history.

                    Various algal forms from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, ca. 1843–53

 As it is, Atkins has become a posthumous celebrity, raised from obscurity in the 1980s by art historian Larry Schaaf as quite possibly the world’s first woman photographer. Today, her cyanotypes — of ferns as well as algae — are housed in the collections of some of the finest museums in the world and have come to be understood primarily as objets d’art, prized less for their scientific contributions than their artistic merit. Yet beyond their aesthetic innovations, these images convey something important about the understanding of the natural world at a time of scientific upheaval, even if this was not their creator’s explicit intent.

By her own admission, Anna Atkins (née Children) turned to the medium of cyanotypes because she felt they could best capture the minute details of the algal specimens that were the subject of her first photographic book. But by the time Atkins published British Algae, she had already demonstrated her affinity for botanical drawing. After her mother died in her infancy, Atkins was raised by her father, a chemist, mineralogist, and zoologist who gave her a scientific education that would have been uncommon for a woman at that time. Under his guidance, she took up drawing at a young age and illustrated a companion to his translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells in 1823. Her prior achievements with hand-drawing naturally lead one to wonder why she would choose to turn to cyanotypes, a more costly and in many ways less practical medium, and there are potential insights to be found in the long evolution of scientific illustration as a genre.

              Illustration by Anna Atkins for John Children's English translation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells,                          published in Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and Art, Volume 16 (1823)

Atkins’ illustrational and photographic work situated her within an artistic tradition that stretches back nearly two millennia, with conventions that have evolved over time to suit its users’ needs. Among the earliest iterations of botanical illustration were manuals or “herbals” that helped medical practitioners identify plants with therapeutic properties. In the 1600s, naturalists began documenting the exotic flora they encountered during exploratory trips to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, producing lavishly illustrated books for the homebound European scholar. But the so-called Golden Age of botanical illustration came later, coinciding with the height of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. During this period, one of the primary aims of botanical illustrators was to contribute to the total understanding of the natural universe, a goal that was understood to be not just theoretically possible but actually achievable.

In the field of botany, one of the most prolific contributors to the Enlightenment project was Carl Linnaeus, who developed a standardized system for identifying and naming all manner of flora and fauna. His popularization of binomial nomenclature provided a globally uniform set of species names, while his taxonomy offered an orderly system whereby plants could be divided into genera based almost solely on the structure and number of their reproductive organs, discounting most other features. Linnaeus was handsomely rewarded for his contributions to the field. He was known in his time as the “Prince of Botanists” and was knighted by the King of Sweden in 1758, but this popularity can largely be attributed to the fact that his work reaffirmed the already popular notion that the universe was an orderly system just waiting to reveal its secrets to the keen minds capable of deciphering them.

By the time Atkins was working a century later, this orderly vision of the world had begun to unravel. A confluence of scientific discoveries — from more accurate theories about the age of the earth to the discovery of previously unknown organisms in the fossil record — had led many naturalists, even those who had previously believed in the fixity of species, to hypothesize that the plants and animals that lived in their time had not existed since the world’s beginning but had instead evolved from entirely different species through interactions with their environment.

             Enteromorpha intestinalis (left) and Ulva bullosa (right) from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae,

                ca. 1843–53

 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put forward his theory on the “transmutation of species” as early as 1802. Thirty years later, Goethe proposed that “[t]he plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, [rather,] they have been given . . . a felicitous mobility and plasticity allowing them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” These whispers eventually culminated in Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the product of more than two decades of agonizing research.

It is difficult to say just how much Atkins may have been influenced by these ideas. She was surely kept apprised of important discoveries by her father, who played an active role in multiple scientific societies until his death in 1852, but there is no written evidence to suggest that she was particularly invested in the evolutionary debates of the era. Even so, scientific data and how it is presented has always played a part in forming, challenging, or reinforcing its viewers’ understanding of the world, and for all their apparent adherence to tradition, Atkins’ cyanotypes offered a starkly different vision of nature than the one that predominated in her time.

The visual conventions of most nineteenth-century botanical illustration had helped uphold the idea that species were discrete, innate, and unchanging. Specimens were typically displayed alone on a white ground, devoid of environmental context. Although fidelity was paramount, artists would omit distracting imperfections from their drawings, and the final image was often the composite of multiple specimens, implying the existence of a platonic ideal. Sometimes the central subject was surrounded by additional views of the plant in various life stages, or in cross-section, if significant features were obscured in the primary drawing. These conventions suited the purposes of identifying and codifying plant species, but they also reflect a scientific approach that, to quote the ethnobiologist Scott Atran, “emerged by decontextualizing nature, by curiously tearing out water lilies from water so that they could be dried, measured, printed, and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and most of the senses.”

                  Chromolithograph of fern specimens, published by L. Prang, ca. 1861–97

                                                                                

                  Various fern forms from Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853

Upon initial examination, a similar charge could be made against Atkins, whose practice necessitated tearing her subjects from their environs and likewise presented them alone on the page, though in her case this was partly a limitation of her chosen medium. Indeed, it was not only the natural context that was concealed by the cyanotype process, the specimen's surface and texture too was lost to these startling, blue-and-white silhouettes.

Despite these limitations, one can’t help but see in Atkins’ images of algae and ferns the ghostly presence of their lost vegetal source, for the cyanotype necessarily preserves the vagaries of an individual specimen. Here the torn leaves and tangled roots, invariably captured by the photographic process, act as an affirmation of the materiality of their subject and help retain something of the amateur engagement with nature in which the plant is met on its own terms, never fully revealing itself to its human observer. Though not literally snapshots, her images capture their subjects at a particular moment in time, granting them an exceptional degree of authenticity when compared to traditional botanical illustration, whose practitioners were still largely involved in upholding a static and increasingly outdated vision of the world. By 1856, around the peak of Atkins’ career, Darwin would disparage his peers’ ongoing efforts to divide the earth’s biota into a set of fixed species as “trying to define the indefinable.”

 The evolutionist’s concerns dovetailed with a contemporaneous, albeit waning, strand of scientific inquiry, one that pushed back against the excesses of an increasingly strict positivism and saw the sensuous engagement with nature as a precondition for genuine understanding. This romantic approach to life science, what Goethe referred to as “tender empiricism”, prioritized the study of processes over organisms in isolation, and understood life to be mutually constituted, constantly changing form through its environmental interactions. As Amanda Jo Goldstein has argued, many of the naturalists and writers who subscribed to this school of thought, among them Goethe, Blake, Shelley, and Herder, put a premium on firsthand engagements with nature and aimed to capture their experiences in poetic modes that reflected their own capacity to affect and be affected by their objects of study.

              Sargassum plumosum (left) and Porphyra laciniata (right) from Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae, 

                 ca. 1843–53

                                                                                         

                    Asperococcus pusillus (left) and Myriotrichia claviformis (right) from Anna Atkins’                                                                       Photographs of British Algae, ca. 1843–53

We can see a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced — supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order.

In many ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We discount such a lesson at our peril.

Rhapsodies in Blue Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes. By  Paige Hirschey. The Public Domain Review, December 6, 2023. 

 

In an extract from an essay accompanying a newly published facsimile, Peter Walther tells the story of how this remarkable publication came about.

British Algae (1843-53) by Anna Atkins is thought to be the first book to be illustrated using photographic images. The English botanist (1799-1871) produced her collection using the cyanotype technique, which she became aware of through her father’s friendship with its inventor, John Herschel. Later this month, Taschen is publishing a facsimile of British Algae alongside Atkins’s other book, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853). Below is an extract from an accompanying essay by Peter Walther, detailing Atkins’s development of the book.

 Anna Atkins herself had collected and dried most of the plants included in British Algae. At harvest time, the algae were immediately rinsed in water, then taken home where she used dissecting forceps and camelhair brushes to remove extraneous matter, before finally pressing and drying them. Since the backs of many of Atkins’ images are pale blue in colour, we can assume that she did not always sensitize the paper with a brush or sponge. Instead, she immersed it in chemical solutions. To create a cyanotype, Atkins placed the plants on to the suitably prepared paper set into a copy frame, which she then covered with a glass plate so as to guarantee the closest possible contact with the support surface. The result was a lavishly detailed outline image. Areas only partly permeable to light appeared brighter in the image than those fully exposed, while denser algae were less distinctly visible.

Alongside the specimen, a label showing the name of the plant was placed on the paper. The label indicating the plant’s name was first dipped in oil to make it transparent, so that when exposed to the light only the script remained.

Depending on the weather and the intensity of the sun the copy frames were left [...] for between five and 15 minutes. After a time, the paper would turn to a yellowish green colour which, after the sheets were rinsed in water, turned to a more or less intense blue.

Anna Atkins gave her cyanotypes serial numbers. Even when she examined the plant numerous times, there were some noticeable differences between specimens belonging to the same series. Before each exposure, the algae were rearranged on the prepared paper. Sometimes they appeared in reverse in the image, but at other times they seemed to have moved only a short distance. The intensity of the blue varied from one species to another. October 1843 saw the publication of around 15 copies of the first volume of British Algae, which she dedicated to her father. In a foreword, Atkins reflected on the reasons why she had produced the book. “The difficulty of making accurate drawings, so minute as many of the Algae and Confervae, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of the Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.”

The first editions of the album were sent to the Royal Society, Herschel, [Henry Fox] Talbot, the minerology and photo pioneer Robert Hunt and the book collector Thomas Phillips. The British Museum, the Linnean Society of London and the botanical gardens in London and Edinburgh were similarly honoured. [...] In the subsequent years leading up to the spring of 1849, a total of ten volumes, each containing twelve prints, [were sewn] together by hand. The recipients were responsible for collating and binding the sections together.

Anna Atkins and the Algae : how the first photobook was made in the mid-1800s. By José Da Silva. The Art Newspaper, May 2, 2023.

Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes.  Taschen

The plants are white as ghosts, and they float in fields as sharply blue as the waters off Dover. Each one is a little miracle, their neuron-like roots winding across the page, their leaves revealing every branching vein. These are photographs, produced only with the light of the sun and an amateur’s chemistry set. There was no precedent for them in the early 1840s — when a woman invented the photobook.

She was the British photographer Anna Atkins, who may not be as well known as Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot and other men from the medium’s first decade. But her intensely beautiful blueprints of marine plants, which she began making in 1843, are as significant for the development of photography as for the history of science.

Her magnum opus, “Photographs of British Algae,” whose first sections she published 175 years ago this fall, was the first volume ever to be illustrated with photographs, albeit ones made without a camera. Dozens of pages from that book are on view in “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins,” on the interplay of science and art at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

Atkins was born in 1799, in the southeast of England; her father, John George Children, was an amateur chemist who went on to work for the British Museum. He also translated several important scientific treatises into English, like an 1823 taxonomy of shells that young Anna painstakingly illustrated for him. He encouraged his daughter’s interest in the natural world; the New York Public Library’s show includes an early herbarium in which she pressed dried thistles and mint sprigs, and an album of tender watercolor landscapes, begun in 1835 and continued for decades after, that Anna painted as a gift to her husband, the Kent landowner John Pelly Atkins.

In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot announced that he had discovered a new means of “photogenic drawing,” which could trace the details of plants, fabrics or the like on light-sensitized paper. (Photography has the rare distinction of being invented twice: Daguerre and Talbot hit on two different techniques, independently of each other, in the same year.) Talbot presented his technique at the Royal Society, of which John George Children was the secretary, and Anna Atkins would soon correspond with Talbot through her father. Like Talbot, she saw that the new technology of photography would allow for a greater scientific accuracy in botanical illustration — which until then had relied either on letterpress printing, which was only as good as its illustrators, or else on dried specimens that turned brittle before long.

She began to collect seaweed from the southeast coast of England and the ponds around Kent, and she implored friends to lend their own specimens. Then, starting in 1843, she started producing “photographical impressions” of these algae, “many of which,” as she wrote in a letter displayed in the show, “are so minute that accurate drawings of them are very difficult to make.”

 Her chosen technique was the cyanotype — or blueprint, as it would later be known when architects embraced it. You first slather a sheet of paper with a solution of iron salts, then leave it to dry. Next, you place an object on the paper and compress it under a pane of glass. Leave it in the sun for about 15 minutes, then wash the exposed sheet in water, and the uncovered portion of the paper takes on a rich Prussian blue.

The rest of the sheet, obscured by the compressed algae or leaves, features a white negative impression, like an X-ray or a snow angel. The species Dictyota dichotoma becomes a bundle of thick, tangled rhizomes, while Furcellaria fastigiata comprises spindlier, daintier strands that look like nerve endings. One seaweed specimen has the density of a chanterelle mushroom; another appears more like a tangle of fallen feathers.

Yet these are clearly more than an amateur scientist’s recordings. Atkins laid down the plants on the page with a careful eye to composition, often with an attempt at symmetry. Pairs of specimens are arrayed like nearly identical siblings; thicker seaweed results in more indistinct, abstract skeins. The algae bristle and undulate in Atkins’s cyanotypes, whose rich blues, of course, recall the ocean. Even the captions exhibit a playful inventiveness. For the title page of one chapter of her book, she fashioned the letters in “British Algae” out of wispy strands of seaweed, forming its name out of its subject.

As cyanotypes are not made from a negative, each Atkins photogram was one-of-a-kind — making “British Algae” an arduous enterprise that took a decade of labor. (Servants would likely have helped her, though we know next to nothing about her working process.) The resultant books were different, too. Atkins mailed the pages to subscribers as she completed them; readers then sewed the fascicles together as they pleased.

Her efforts to circulate her work, both to eminent botanists and to photography pioneers like Talbot (who was then completing his own first book, “The Pencil of Nature”), make Atkins quite a different figure from other undersung women now enjoying the attention of New York museums — like Orra White Hitchcock, whose scientific illustrations for her husband’s university lessons were shown at the American Folk Art Museum this summer, or Hilma af Klint, the Swedish theosophist whose groundbreaking abstract paintings, now on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, were not exhibited during her lifetime. Atkins, while reserved, was no outsider, and her blueprints are as significant for who saw them as for what they depicted. The New York Public Library’s collection of Atkins’s photograms, for one, belonged to John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype process.

The library has supplemented its showcase of Atkins with a pendant show upstairs, “Anna Atkins Refracted,” featuring 19 contemporary photographers. Most of them make use of cameraless photography techniques; a good number also engage with themes of botany or the place of women in science. The German photographer Ulf Saupe has created a rich cyanotype that resembles one of Atkins’s undulating algae, but is in fact an impression of a plastic bag afloat in the ocean. Strange, wonderful photograms by Letha Wilson begin from impressions of found flowers and industrial objects; she then folds the exposed sheets, photographs them (with a camera), and reprints the uncanny, Bauhaus-ish result.

 It’s worth returning to the Atkins exhibition once you’ve seen this contemporary showcase, to look again at her blueprints with an eye on their aesthetic daring. “British Algae” has its place in the history of photography and book publishing, but these resonant cyanotypes are also artifacts from a time when science and art were better acquainted. The plants look like river deltas, like plumes of smoke, like controlled detonations, like lightning bolts scything through darkness. The question of whether photography was art would roil audiences for more than a century to come — but Atkins already had the answer.

She Needed No Camera to Make the First Book of Photographs. By Jason Farago. The New York Times, November  15, 2018. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then photo books offer even richer narratives. Invented in the 19th century, the form allows for pictorial storytelling, in collectible format. Carefully arranged images convey a photographer’s larger aesthetic aims: Robert Frank’s iconic 1958 monograph The Americans offers a lyrical glimpse of post-war society, while Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency still induces nostalgia for New York bohemia. Unlike the temporary nature of an exhibition, photo books are always available for return visits.

The tale of photo books themselves began in 19th-century England, with a surprising subject matter and inventor: an amateur botanist named Anna Atkins, whose work is straightforwardly described in the book’s title, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

Raised in restrictive 1800s Britain,Atkins created her groundbreaking document with support and mentorship from her progressive, scientist father, John George Children. Atkins’s monograph proved that a new creative medium also had important practical implications for non-artistic disciplines.

Atkins was born in 1799 in Kent, England, and was raised by Children, her mother having died shortly after childbirth. Children, a chemist, encouraged Atkins’s developing passion for botany. Though society dictated strict gender roles—women were expected to be content as homemakers—Children wanted to raise his daughter differently. He offered Atkins and her friends science lessons, and employed Atkins as his lab assistant.

Atkins was also intrigued by photography, a medium still in its nascent stages. She maintained a correspondence with William Henry Fox Talbot, who pioneered the early field of photography. In 1841, Talbot had patented the calotype, which employed a light-sensitive paper coated with silver nitrate that, when exposed to light, recorded light and shadow.

Talbot wasn’t the only Brit to experiment with photography. Children’s circle of friends included Sir John Herschel, an astronomer and chemist who, in 1842, developed another light-sensitive paper that recorded images against a blue background, which he called the cyanotype. The form became a means of reproducing drawings, in particular, architectural blueprints.

In 1841, English physician William H. Harvey published Manual of British Algae; Atkins found the work visually insufficient. Indeed, Harvey had listed and described all the new algae specimens he could find, without offering any illustrations. Atkins, empowered to create her own version, made cyanotypes to imprint the images of algae for posterity. Herschel himself probably taught the process to Atkins.

Today, algae might seem a rather banal subject for history’s first book of photography. Yet New York Public Library curator Joshua Chuang believes that Harvey’s manual and Atkins’s subsequent work were part of a larger natural history craze in Britain. People were cataloging plant life, attempting to harness the multiplicity of nature. “[Some] of the great mysteries of the natural world [were] things from the sea,” he said. “And algae were accessible, beautiful, and various.”

 

This fall, Chuang is mounting two exhibitions at the library: “Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins” and “Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works” (co-curated by Elizabeth Cronin, the NYPL’s assistant curator of photography). The first exhibition examines Atkins’s achievements, while the second addresses Atkins’s influence on and resonance within contemporary art practice.

“Blue Prints” will include multiple copies of Atkins’s photo-illustrated manuscript. Between 1843 and 1853, she created and distributed the pages filled with cyanotypes that would become her book, distributing the tome in parts, bound in soft covers. Atkins sent the book to acquaintances, who had to visit bookbinders to sew the different sections together. In all, Atkins produced 17 handmade copies; because of her process, however, no two were alike.

Today, Atkins’s book manifests an ethereal beauty. White, feathery outlines of algae ripple across deep blue backgrounds. Elegant white type along the bottom of each cyanotype gives each species’ name—all sounding, to the untrained ear, more like mystical incantations than botanical designations: Chordaria flagelliformis, Polysiphonia affinis, Cystoseira granulata.

When Atkins died in 1871, her name faded in and out of history. Influential personalities of her time, including Scottish book collector William Lang Jr., recognized her achievement. In 1864, Lang read an article by Talbot about non-silver photographic processes that mentioned Atkins’s work, without mentioning her name. “Lang was so entranced that he thought to himself, ‘I have to find a copy,’” recounted Chuang. After a several-year search, Lang identified a London bookseller with the manuscript and bought it in 1888. He wrote an article about the book in an 1889–90 volume of the Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow.

Lang, however, still wasn’t sure who’d created the book: Atkins had signed her work “AA,” leading him to conclude that the initials stood for “Anonymous Amateur.” A few weeks after Lang published his piece, a curator from London’s Natural History Museum wrote to the journal editor and said that he, too, owned a copy of the book in question, and he knew it was by a Mrs. Atkins. Lang embarked on a series of public exhibitions and lectures, conducting, said Chuang, something “almost like an Anna Atkins roadshow.”

Lang’s finances suffered towards the end of his life, and he had to sell off a portion of his library that included Photographs of British Algae. When he died in the early 1900s, Atkins lost a major champion. According to Chuang, a 1955 history of photography included her name, along with just a few sentences.

Finally, in the 1970s, an art historian named Larry Schaaf, working at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered Atkins’s work and attempted to piece together her biography. “He basically put her on the map not only as a pioneer of photography, but also the first person to publish a photographically illustrated book,” said Chuang. In 1985, Schaaf helped re-publish Atkins’s work in Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms.

In the years since, contemporary curators have bolstered Atkins’s reputation. In 2004, the Drawing Center in New York and the Yale Center for British Art organized a show—“Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature in the Victorian Era”—of 19th-century botanical photography, which included prints by Atkins alongside those of Talbot and Herschel. A 2010–11 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” included Atkins’s cyanotypes alongside work by Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and other women photography leaders.

Curators, scholars, and artists alike are ensuring that Atkins’s name remains integral to art canon. Her story, like so many others, reminds us that artistic innovation isn’t enough to secure an adequate legacy—future generations must write about and champion worthy projects. Atkins’s brilliant work, which was nearly lost to history, is getting a new chance to shine

The 19^th-Century Botanist Who Changed The Course of Photography. By Alina Cohen.  Artsy,   October 16, 2018