The first lenswoman

Anna Atkins, hailed as the first woman photographer to click a picture, was born in the United Kingdom on 16 March 1799. She lost her mother at birth and was raised by her father. Anna received the best scientific education a woman could receive at her time. She engraved her father’s translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells onto actual shells.

In 1825, she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, and moved to the Atkins family home in Sevenoaks, Kent. They had no children. Atkins pursued her interests in botany and had a large collection of plants and algae, which were used as photograms later. Atkins was known to have first had access to a camera in 1841.

Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype photographic process in 1842 which helped Atkins photograph algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype photograms that were contact-printed by placing the original unmounted dried-algae directly on the cyanotype paper.

Atkins, self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843. Although privately published with a limited number of copies, and with handwritten text, it is considered the first book illustrated with photographic images. She has published many more cyanotypes.