(courtesy of GOOGLE 2015)
SET AGAINST that bright Prussian blue background, like alabaster ballerinas of sun and light and frozen movement, Anna Atkins’s subjects still beguile like some botanical dance....HT: The Paris Review who write:
From Photographs of British Algae
Some claim that Anna Atkins—born on this day in 1799, in Kent—was the first woman to take a photograph. Others that hers were the first photos ever printed in book form.
Atkins was a botanist, an artist, and an accomplished nature photographer. Her father was a scientist, and he encouraged his daughter’s early interest in botany. Both her father and her eventual husband, John Pelly Atkins, were friendly with the pioneering photographer and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot; it was probably Talbot who introduced her to the techniques she would come to use in her art....MUCH MORE
