19th CENTURY + STEREOGRAMS
Francis Frith (1822 - 1898)
Francis Frith was a successful entrepreneur and photographer whose topographical views responded to the high demand in the mid-nineteenth-century in England for pictorial evidence of Middle Eastern subjects. Although his use of three negative formats for each view--8 x 10, 16 x 20, and stereoscopic pairs--points to the commercial nature of his enterprise, those negatives also reveal his experimentation with exposure times and vantage points in order to discern the most pleasing composition for each site. Underscoring his comprehension of the artistic possibilities of photography were the many articles he wrote about the subject, in which he argued for the ability of photographs to communicate divine truth and aesthetic awareness to the general population.
