Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine

by Nickel, Douglas R.

• ISBN13: 9780691115153
• ISBN10: 069111515X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-22
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In 1856, the English photographer Francis Frith set out on the first of three tours of Egypt and the Holy Lands. Traveling up the Nile and then on to the Sinai, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, Frith systematically crafted exquisite pictures of ruins, landscapes, and legendary sites. He then published his views in England and America in a variety of formats, becoming something of a celebrity in photographic circles. This book, the first to place Frith's Egyptian and Levantine images in cultural context, reveals the distinct meanings these ostensibly "topographic" pictures held for the photographer and his Victorian audience. A Quaker by birth and an entrepreneur by nature, Frith brought to his photographic projects a sense of mission: to revive and confirm the stories of the Bible, while offering the region to armchair travelers as a seamless Oriental milieu of Romantic reverie.Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestinenarrates the political, intellectual, and social concerns that make Frith representative of England's encounter with the East in the nineteenth century. Historian of photography Douglas R. Nickel brings a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to bear on the subject in order to expose the complexity of Frith's image-making, setting the photographs against a Victorian backdrop of religious debate, imperialist thought, Romantic philosophy, and Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics.

Author Biography

Douglas R. Nickel is Director of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Table of Contents

Maps of Frith's Travels	p. 6
Introduction: A Victorian Photographer Abroad	p. 9
The Automatic Machinery of Circumstance	p. 21
Spirit Facts: Biography as History	p. 33
Egypt, the Greatest Sensation	p. 43
Photographed and Described	p. 67
A Fulcrum for My Lever	p. 85
Religion as Science, Science as Philosophy	p. 97
A Christian Positivist	p. 111
The View from Above	p. 137
Self-Portrait in Eastern Costume	p. 149
Conclusion: A Sermon in Stones	p. 171
Chronology	p. 175
App.: Negative Numbers and Plate Titles	p. 177
Notes	p. 180
Selected Bibliography	p. 224
Acknowledgments	p. 232
Index	p. 233
Photography Credits	p. 239
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