Anna Atkins was the world’s first woman photographer. She was also the first person to print and publish a photographically illustrated book, British Algae (1843). She took up what she called ‘Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of cyanotype’ as soon as it was invented in 1842. At that time she was already skilled at drawing shells and other natural specimens. Her motivation for taking up photography was surely aesthetic as well as scientific. This is probably the first photographic portrait of a dandelion. (It could even be called a self-portrait, in that the dandelion was placed on light sensitive paper and imprinted its own image under the rays of the sun, without the use of a camera.) It comes from Atkins’s finest album, which she presented to her friend and co-photographer Anne Dixon in 1854.