558
Became William Friese-Greene after marriage to Vic-
toria Mariana Helena Friese in 1874. Apprenticed to
photographer Maurice Guttenberg of Bristol. Became
owner of portrait studios in Bath, Bristol, Plymouth,
London and Brighton. In partnership in the 1880s with
Esmé Collings. Inspired by J.A.R. Rudge’s glass-plate
moving images, Friese-Greene patented two sequence
cameras for fl exible materials: one (1889) with engineer
Mortimer Evans, another (stereoscopic, 1893) from a
design by Frederick Varley. Paper (and later, celluloid)
‘fi lms’ taken with his cameras, including a view of Kings
Road, Chelsea, were at a slow rate, and projection was
unsuccessful. Helena died 1895. He devised, with John
Alfred Prestwich, a fl ickerless projector (1896). Married
Edith Harrison in 1897. Patented a color motion picture
process (1905). Other patents through 1921—some
practical, others unworkable—included electrical de-
vices, X-Rays, inkless printing, and color photography.
Poor fi nancial control led to two bankruptcies. He died
5 May 1921, London. Claimed to be, and posthumously
championed as ‘The Inventor of Kinematography,’ he
was subject of an unreliable biography, Friese-Greene:
Close-up of an Inventor (Ray Alister, London: Marsland
1948), and a romantic biopic The Magic Box (1951).
Stephen Herbert
FRANCIS FRITH & CO.
In 1884 the British photographer Francis Frith wrote his
memoirs of the fi rst sixty-two years of his life, the fi rst
words of which were as follows: “I am what circum-
stances over which I have had little or no control from
my very birth have made me.” Such modest words open
the autobiography of a man who had amassed a fortune
in the grocery business by the time he was thirty-four
and then went on to become one of the pre-eminent
travel photographers of his day and founded F. Frith &
Co., a photographic printing fi rm and archive in England
that was the largest of its kind in the 19th century.
While not the only photographer of his era to publish
scenic views of exotic places and monuments commer-
cially, Frith was arguably the most prolifi c, and an inte-
gral fi gure in the popularization of the travel photograph
specifi cally, and commercial photography generally. His
reputation as a photographer was established largely on
his photographic work from his three expeditions to the
Near East between 1856 and 1860. Indeed, the critical
and commercial success of these photographs allowed
Frith to start Frith & Co., whose vast photographic
archive would survive well into the 20th century and
become Frith’s greatest legacy.
Francis Frith Jr. was born on October 7, 1822 in
Chesterfi eld, Derbyshire to Francis and Alice Frith. The
second of three children and the only son to a prosper-
ous wine merchant, Francis Frith Jr. grew up in a liberal
yet devout Quaker household. He spent the fi rst decade
of his life in Chesterfi eld, spending much of his youth
exploring the bucolic hills and woods surrounding his
home. At the age of ten Frith was sent off to a Quaker
boarding school where he remained until the age of
sixteen. In 1838, upon the completion of his studies and
at the insistence of his father, Frith began a fi ve-year
apprenticeship in a Sheffi eld cutlery fi rm.
Frith never completed his apprenticeship, however, as
he had what can best be described as a nervous break-
down around 1843 and returned home for an extended
convalescence. After regaining his health Frith traveled
the towns and countryside of Scotland and Wales for the
better part of two years. At trip’s end Frith reentered the
world of business, this time in the thriving, industrial
seaport of Liverpool, where sometime around 1845
he and a partner started a wholesale grocery business
provisioning transatlantic vessels. The company fl our-
ished, and Frith eventually sold the business and used
the proceeds to fi nance a small printing company around
1850, which also proved successful. By 1856 Frith sold
his printing fi rm as well and, having amassed a small
fortune from his two business ventures, retired a wealthy
man at the age of thirty-four.
It was apparently during his time in Liverpool that
Frith fi rst took an interest in photography, so much so
that in 1853 he became one of the founding members of
the Liverpool Photographic Society. When Frith fi nally
left Liverpool after the sale of his printing fi rm and
moved to Reigate, a town south of London, he continued
his photographic activities and even exhibited a number
of his photographic portraits and landscapes at the Pho-
tographic Society of London in January 1856.
Soon after relocating to Reigate, however, Frith
decided to travel, and in September of 1856 he set sail
for Alexandria, Egypt on the fi rst of three life-changing
photographic expeditions to the region. His itinerary
combined his enthusiasm for photography and travel
with an astute entrepreneurial awareness of the eager
market in Victorian Britain for photographs of the
Near East, at that time a region known mostly through
written accounts and the drawings and lithographs of
the Scottish artist David Roberts. Accompanying Frith
on his expedition to the Near East was Francis Herbert
Wenham, a friend and engineer who advised Frith on the
mechanical and optical aspects of photography.
Frith and Wenham traveled to archeological sites
across Egypt with an entourage of assistants and staff
and a small convoy of wagons needed to transport the
sizable photographic outfi t required by Frederick Scott
Archer’s recently introduced wet-plate collodion process
and Frith’s three different cameras: a standard full-plate
(200 × 250mm), a mammoth (400 × 500mm) and a
small stereoscopic camera. Frith preferred the clarity
provided by the wet-plate system’s glass negatives and