Francis Frith self portrait in Middle Eastern garb, 1857. From the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of agae. Oroginal photograph is in the Philadelphia Museum..

Our discussion on Friday of antique photographs of the unveriling of ancient Egyptian mummies got me thinking of Francis Frith (1822-1898).  Frith was the first great photographer of ancient Egyptian monuments and the Nile Valley.

Francis Frith  was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom.  Frith recognized that images of Egypt were in great demand by “armchair travelers.”  From 1856 to 1860 he traveled in the Middle East with a huge (16″ x 20″) with a collodion process camera.  This was a great accomplishment given the dust and heat of the desert. We have said this repeatidly of many of Frith’s contemporaries – yet in remains indisputable.  Photographing in those days required extreme dedication to purpose, art, and technique.

In 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co., which was the world’s first specialist photographic publisher, selling his beautiful images of Egypt and the Middle East.  He then embarked on a colossal project, typical of the grand vision Victorian mindset – to photograph every town in the United Kingdom.  These he sold as travel postcards. Eventually hiring a team of photographers, his studio became one of the largest in the world, with over a thousand shops selling his postcards.

Remarkably, his family continued the firm well into the twentieth century.  It was sold in 1968 and closed in 1970 only to be  was restored in a 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection, when this important archive was purchased by  the tobacco company Rothmans.  

In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. As a result even today, over 150 years since it founding you can still find and purchase both nostalgic and historic images.

Figure 2 – The Hypaethral Temple, Philae, by Francis Frith, 1857; from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland (on Flickr), from the Wikimedia commons and in the public domain because of age.