Anna Atkins

She is considered to be the first person to ever publish a photo-book, however these prints were made by a camera-less technique, so maybe some people can argue over this point
Her mother died when she was just a baby, so she grew up close to her father who was a botanist, she she grew up knowing plants intimitely.
This knowledge and her friendship through her husband to WHF Talbot led to her making light prints of the things she new best. Another family friend was Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the Cyanotype. This is what she used to make her most notable works and books.
cyanotype process is quite important, as it was used to make prints of plans for architechural buildings - blueprints!
the tones of the plant materieals in the whites of the are quite nice. what is interesting is this early desire to record the natural world and set it in order. i can almost imagine these first photobooks being great for learning, she gave them out among her friends i think, im guessing by her husband and accquiantances that they had an interest in botany too, they would keep these tomes in their library to be taken out when they needed to recall a certain plant. I went to visit Charles Darwin's house, and i remember the size of it and his garden, i can just imagine a similar house with a library with another scientist or someone interested in the natural world with these books looking up the names of things. again its this point about imagination from early photographic works.
However really the amazing thing about her work, is the realisation that photographic technique could create accurate copies of extremely intricate things, to aid in learning.

Something else i personally find interesting about her work, having tried cyanotype process for myself, is that the images are unique, they are all straight to paper images, created by placing the object over the paper and exposing, then processing; the result is a photogram. does mean my images re technically photograms, i mean there is a camera involved, but there is no point when i make a positive, no point i use what is essentially a negative to make a 'truer to life' representation?