Customer Reviews

Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine: A Victorian Photographer Abroad

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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.

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.