Google Doodle celebrates Anna Atkins

This is my 9,970th post, which means that within the week we’ll get to post number 10,000. I’m still pondering the 172 comments on the thread following “The 10,000th post: what shall it be?“, in which readers suggested way to celebrate this landmark. If I decide to use one of those suggestions, that reader gets an autographed copy of WEIT with a cat drawn in it. Given that there will probably be nearly ten posts today, as there’s a lot to say, I expect the Big Day to be Thursday or Friday. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot below to go there) celebrates Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a British botanist and photographer. Today would be her 216th birthday, and her distinction was to be the first person to publish any book that included photographs. In fact, she may have been the first woman to take a photograph. The Doodle gives an idea of what her photos looked like:

Here’s the title page of that pathbreaking self-published book, which appeared in 1853 (the first commercially published book with photos, by William Henry Fox Talbot, appeared 8 months later). This and all photographs are taken from the British Library’s site.

The captions were in her Atkins’s own handwriting, and the book went through three editions. According to Wikipedia, only 17 copies still exist, and they’re extremely valuable: one was auctioned off for £229,250 in 2004. But you can see the whole book for free, as the British Library has most of it scanned in (go here).

Here’s one of the pages from the table of contents, in Atkins’s handwriting:

From Vox we have some information about the process she used (their text indented):

Early photographers struggled with a problem: they couldn’t easily develop their pictures because the existing techniques were slow, expensive, or required dangerous chemicals. Herschel came up with a solution: using an iron pigment called “Prussian blue,” he laid objects or photographic negatives onto chemically-treated paper, let them be exposed to sunlight for around 15 minutes, and then washed the paper. The remaining image revealed pale blue objects on a dark blue background. This was a cyanotype — a new way to print photographs permanently.

Herschel primarily used cyanotypes to copy notes, but when Atkins heard about the opportunity, she leapt at it. Though she’d shown herself to be a capable artist, she realized instantly that cyanotypes were a better way to capture the intricacies of plant life and avoid the tedium — and error — involved with drawing. As importantly, her passion for botany allowed her to see a new application of the exciting technology.

So, in 1843, she began making a photographic book of algae.

Atkins’ British Algae was the definition of a labor of love. Published in piecemeal over a decade, from the 1840s to the 1850s, the book was made at home using her own materials. From what we know, she collected the algae with the help of her friend Anne Dixon and dried and pressed it, the same way you might press flowers. Then, she identified it using William Harvey’s Manual of British Algae. Finally, she made the cyanotype by laying each piece upon the paper (that’s why, technically, her pictures are called photograms, not photographs, because they didn’t use a camera). The book’s text appears in her own elegant cursive.

The book wasn’t a profit-making enterprise for Atkins, but it was an important one. It stands as the first book illustrated with photographs, and it brought together photography and botany for the first time. Atkins took the most fleeting and unusual of subjects — British algae — and made it timeless.

You have to really love algae to do something like this.