Frederick H. Evans

Frederick H. Evans was born in London in 1853. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s he ran a bookshop in Cheapside while beginning to photograph; in 1889 the seventeen-year-old Aubrey Beardsley began browsing the shop during his lunch hour. Evans championed Beardsley's drawings and introduced him to publisher John M. Dent — the commission that launched Beardsley's career. George Bernard Shaw was also a regular customer^*1. In 1898 Evans closed the bookshop to devote himself entirely to photography, adopting platinum printing as his exclusive medium. He embarked on a systematic campaign to photograph the interiors of English and French cathedrals — Wells, Lincoln, Ely, Durham, Canterbury, Rheims, Bourges — producing platinum prints whose wide tonal range and matte surface suggested the quality of pencil drawing combined with the precision of etching. In 1900 Evans held a 150-print solo exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society and was elected a Fellow of the Linked Ring^*2. His working philosophy was what he called 'the straightest of the straight photography' — exposing negatives so precisely that no darkroom manipulation would ever be required. He described cathedrals as 'poems in stone' and would spend weeks studying a building at different times of day before photographing. In 1903 he made 'A Sea of Steps' at Wells Cathedral — now in MoMA, LACMA, the George Eastman Museum, and other major collections — the most celebrated architectural photograph of its era. Stieglitz called Evans 'the greatest exponent of architectural photography' and devoted Camera Work No. 4 (October 1903) to his work, with an introductory essay by Shaw^*3. Evans exhibited at Stieglitz's '291' gallery in New York in 1906. When World War I made platinum paper unobtainable, Evans refused to work in substitute materials and effectively retired from photography around 1915. He died in London in 1943, aged 89.