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| Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas R. Nickel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $72.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 569602
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 11.2 x 10.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 069111515X
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.92
EAN: 9780691115153
ASIN: 069111515X
Publication Date: December 22, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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 Palestine narrates 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
 excellent writing, impressive scholarship August 16, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Though nicely illustrated, this is no mere picture book. Its real strength lies in its well written text and critical apparatus. Nickel's scholarship is impressive: the book combines a sophisticated approach to writing biography (Frith's) with just enough historical detail and Victorian cultural context to bring the ideas to life. Best suited to audiences operating above a fifth-grade reading level.
 Dry text ..... Great Images April 15, 2004
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
The text reads like a dry, doctoral dissertation that makes me thankful I didn't become a college professor. Passages like the following are prevalent throughout the book : "Moving from science to theology to philosophy and the intellectual history of the period, we can see how his photographic productions were explicitly motivated by the categorical imperative of religious faith." After translating this into "His images were based largely on his strong religious beliefs," you can, after some difficulty, get through the extremely burdensome text. The text also goes on multipe tangents trying to explain Victorian England, and the milieu that Frith lived in, but I found it overly burdensome and digressing.I found myself constantly trying to skip ahead of lengthy passages about Darwin's The Origin of Species and other digressing digressions.The best aspect of the book is the images themselves. They are superbly produced with about as much detail from Frith's gigantic glass plates as I could expect a book to have. Frith was a rich man by the time he took his trips to the Middle East, and, whatever his motivations were, these images are historically important as well as having that Middle Eastern mystery I find fascinating. I wished that Nickel would have placed BOTH pairs of Frith's stereo slides into the book, rather than just one side and I also wish he had more images.
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