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EVANS, FREDERICK HENRY (1853–1943)
British bookseller, photographer
In a lantern slide lecture in 1886 before the Photo-
graphic Society of London (since 1894, The Royal
Photographic Society of Great Britain), Evans showed
photomicrographs made, not for scientifi c purposes,
but as images refl ecting his “life-long love and study
of ‘the beautiful.’” George Smith, proprietor of the
Sciopticon Company, had sold Evans a microscope
and a camera and produced these lantern slides from
platinum prints. Smith stressed the pure or straight ap-
proach in photography, and Evans, who lacked art skills,
embraced this approach which would defi ne much future
photographic art.
The photomicrographs included images of minute
shells and sea creatures including a lantern slide titled
‘Spine of Echinus,’ c. 1886, a cross section magnifi ed
40x which readily suggests lace work, a mandala, or a
rose window. The Photographic Society recognized the
aesthetic achievement and awarded Evans their medal
in 1887.
Evans, a respected London bookseller, turned his
camera from photomicrography to cathedrals, where
he often used an 8 × 10 inch plate camera with a lens
selected to fi ll the frame before making a lengthy expo-
sure. He claimed to practice “cathedral picture making”
rather than “mere photography.”
Evans immersed himself in cathedral towns for days
as he experienced the sacred buildings emotionally
while noting locations and lighting for eventual picture
making. Perfectionism might have led to sterile records,
but he was aiming for platinum prints, platinotypes,
which would convey the same emotional response in
the viewer that the original evoked. While interested in
Emanuel Swedenborg’s mysticism through James Garth
Wilkinson’s writings, Evans maintained his photography
concerned beauty, not devotion.
Sprituality through symbolism, however, seems
integral to this beauty, as seen in the soft grey tonal
passages from dark to light that frequently suggest
upward progression.
An example is “Lincoln Cathedral Stair in the S. W.
Turret,” 1895, which shows narrow spiral steps countered
by pointed rib arches, an image suggesting theories
of coincidence in nature from Charles Baudelaire to
Symbolist poet and critic Arthur Symons whom Evans
photographed. “Cathedral picture making,” then, relates
to the Symbolist photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, and fi nd
kinship with such Edward Weston images as “Cham-
bered Nautilus,” 1927, and “Artichoke Halved,” 1930.
Lincoln Cathedral was the subject of some 120 lantern
slides shown at the Royal Photographic Society in 1899.
Among the images was “Lincoln Cathedral: From the
Castle,” 1898, where the dark patchwork of rooftops
gives way to the light fi lled hazy view of the massivecathedral as a sign of the sacred Medieval world contrast-
ing and towering above the profane industrial age.
This photographer’s quest for beauty and the ideal
included the grotesque wall sculpture in cathedrals
which he photographed from slightly below to convey
the viewer’s perspective. Such photography without
resort to dramatic effects treads a narrow line between
record and artistic interpretation.
Recognition of the grotesque and its resolution in
portraiture is found in “Aubrey Beardsley,” 1894. Evans
was attempting a portrait of the artist , whose career he
helped launch, and supposedly likened the gaunt young
man to a gargoyle, whereupon Beardsley struck the pose
of a grotesque on Notre-Dame, Paris. The resulting
photograph is equally a portrait of the artist’s elongated
hands—suggesting gothic ribs—and his beak-like pro-
fi le with the overall image communicating Beardsley’s
avowed commitment to the grotesque.
Though Evans’s portraits are mostly of friends, he
believed that portraiture, more than architecture, offered
photography’s greatest potential for art. He wrote in the
Amateur Photographer, “What is wanted in portraiture
is the portrait, and nothing more; no obvious intrusion,
that is, of the personality of the producer; a true portrait,
of course, an evocation, true to the spiritual and mental
as well as the physical” (Evans, 11 Feb. 1908, in Ham-
mond, Texts, 101).
Evans’s approach to landscape is refl ective of picto-
rialism with its continuation of the picturesque. When
photographing woods, however, Evans expressed a
Symbolist idea of seeing natural forms as relatable to
cathedrals, and so In Redland Woods:
Surrey, 1894, a pathway forming an orthogonal is sur-
rogate for a nave with the tall trees rising to a leafy vault.
For some of his landscapes he used a soft focus portrait
lens, such as New Forest, 1891, showing intertwining
trees whose forms suggest the strainer arches in Wells
Cathedral.
While Evans favored the vertical format, he framed
the picturesque ‘Kelmscott Manor from the Thames,’
1895, with curving road, river, and silhouetted trees
leading to this home of William Morris, leader of the
arts and crafts movement. Evans knew Morris and
photographed Kelmscott’s interiors including the attics
ca. 1897. In these photographs he transfers his sense of
light and form from great architecture to the vernacular
of private spaces and was no doubt infl uential on Paul
Strand and Walker Evans. Though bound to a modern,
mechanical medium, Evans shared much of Morris’s
philosophy along with that of John Ruskin and the Pre-
Raphaelites with their detailed rendering of the natural
world as metaphor for the spiritual.
The quest for “cathedral picture-making” is demon-
strated with Evans’s dissatisfaction with the photograph
“Wells Cathedral: Stairs to Chapter House,” 1899. HeEVANS, FREDERICK HENRY
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