It’s hard to deny that botanist Anna Atkins was the first person to illustrate a book with photographs, the first instalment published in 1843 using the cyanotype process, because her name is on the cover.

It’s much harder to trace the early photographic work of women who didn’t publish books. In Katy Hessel’s book, The Story of Art without Men, she put this down to women’s work either being attributed to men or the author of the work being recorded as anonymous.

In my recent trip to Bristol I discovered the story of Sarah Anne Bright, who signed her work S.A.B. (that’s important).

She experimented with the new photographic papers available in the 1830s in Bristol and in 1839 made an image of a leaf. However, at auction in the 2008 her work was attributed to Fox Talbot and when that was questioned and investigated (they went through a number of possible men involved in photography at the time, mainly caused by mis-reading the initials signed on the work) it was eventually discovered that Sarah was the actual author of the work.

So the lesson for women in art is don’t just sign your work, publish it in a book.