Francis Frith

Francis Frith was an English photographer and businessman. Francis Frith & Co., the company he founded in 1860 with the initial goal of photographing every town and village in England, quickly became the largest photographic publishers in the world and eventually amassed a collection of 330,000 negatives covering over 7,000 population centres across Great Britain and Ireland.

Frith was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, attending Quaker schools at Ackworth and Quaker Camp Hill in Birmingham (c. 1828-1838), before he started in the cutlery business. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1843, recuperating over the next two years. In 1850 he started a photographic studio in Liverpool, known as Frith & Hayward. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions between 1856 and 1860, taking with him three glass plate cameras, the largest of which measured 16" x 20". He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions.

Work
Many of his photographs were collected into published volumes. Initially these works were compiled by established publishing companies. However, by the 1860s, Firth realised that he could profit from publishing his own images and established the publishing company F. Frith & Co.

Select list of publications

• Egypt and Palestine, Photographed and Described by Francis Frith, 2 volumes, London, James S. Virtue, 1858-1859
• Cairo, Sinai, Jerusalem, and the Pyramids of Egypt, A Series of Sixty Photographic Views, by Francis Frith, With Descriptions by Mrs. Sophia Lane Poole and Reginald Stuart Poole, London, James S. Virtue, n.d. (1860)
• Egypt, Palestine and Nubia, 4 volumes, by Francis Frith, London + Glasgow + Edinburgh, William MacKenzie, 1862
• Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia, Illustrated by One Hundred Stereoscopic Photographs Taken by Francis Frith for Messrs. Negretti and Zambra, With Descriptions and Numerous Wood Engravings by Joseph Bonomi, and Notes by Samuel Sharpe London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1862
• The Gossiping Photographer at Hastings, Reigate 1864
• The Gossiping Photographer on the Rhine, Reigate 1864

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024