Anna Atkins (née Children; 16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871; English botanist and photographer. Often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph. Born in Tunbridge, Kent, England in 1799. Her mother Hester Anne Children "didn't recover from the effects of childbirth" and died in 1800. Anna became close to her father John George Children. Anna "received an unusually scientific education for a woman of her time." Her detailed engravings of shells were used to illustrate her father's translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells. In 1825 she married John Pelly Atkins, a London West India merchant, and they moved to Halstead Place, the Atkins family home in Sevenoaks, Kent. They had no children. Atkins pursued her interests in botany, for example by collecting dried plants. These were probably used as photograms later. She was elected a member of the London Botanical Society in 1839. John George Children and John Pelly Atkins were friends of William Henry Fox Talbot. Anna Atkins learned directly from Talbot about two of his inventions related to photography: the "photogenic drawing" technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitized paper which is exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotypes. Atkins was known to have had access to a camera by 1841. Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer. Other sources name Constance Talbot, the wife of William Fox Talbot, as the first female photographer. As no camera-based photographs by Anna Atkins nor any photographs by Constance Talbot survive, the issue may never be resolved. In popular culture On 16 March 2015, Internet search engine Google commemorated Atkins's 216th birthday by placing a Google Doodle image of bluish leaf shapes on a darker background on its search page to represent her cyanoprint work. Atkins' work was a major... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Atkins] undefined

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