Born in 1799 in Tonbridge, England, Anna Atkins, an only child and orphaned by her mother, received a rigorous scientific education - rare for a woman of her time - thanks to her father, John George Children, a renowned scientist.

Trained in scientific drawing, in 1823 she illustrated the English translation, by her father, of the History of Molluscs by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck.

She married John Pelly Atkins in 1825. The couple had no children. Anna Atkins devoted herself to biology and began to compile a reference herbarium.

In 1839, she became a member of the London Botanical Society , one of the few learned societies open to women.

Thanks to the photographer William Henry Fox Talbot, she discovered the technique of photograms, one of the first cameraless photographic techniques that the photographer called "photogenic drawing".

Anna Atkins then turned away from graphic methods and became one of the first practitioners of photography on paper.

However, it was the discovery of cyanotype, a process developed from 1842 onwards by John Herschel, an English astronomer and scientist, that revolutionized his work. The cyanotype technique does not use silver salts like WHF Talbot's, but ferric salts.

What is a cyanotype? It is a photographic image obtained without a camera.

The specimen - object, plant - is placed on a sheet coated with a photosensitive solution.

After exposure to sunlight, the image fixed by washing with water then stands out in white against a Prussian blue background.

Between 1843 and 1853, Atkins published “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions”, a series of volumes containing hundreds of cyanotypes of algae.

This simple and inexpensive process allows him to accurately capture the details of marine plants.

His monumental work represents not only a significant contribution to botany, but also a milestone in the history of photography.

Each specimen is accompanied by detailed scientific notes, making this work a reference.