Lang’s finances suffered towards the end of his life, and he had to sell off a portion of his library that included Photographs of British Algae. When he died in the early 1900s, Atkins lost a major champion. According to Chuang, a 1955 history of photography included her name, along with just a few sentences.
Finally, in the 1970s, an art historian named Larry Schaaf, working at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered Atkins’s work and attempted to piece together her biography. “He basically put her on the map not only as a pioneer of photography, but also the first person to publish a photographically illustrated book,” said Chuang. In 1985, Schaaf helped re-publish Atkins’s work in Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms.