Francis Frith in Egypt

By the mid-19th century the invention of the new scientific art of photography was beginning to make the world seem a smaller place. Photography’s ability to provide accurate images of far-off lands was quickly appreciated as one of its greatest assets, and possibly nowhere more so than in depicting the monuments of ancient Egypt at that time of ‘Egyptomania’. Francis Frith in Turkish Summer Costume, 1857. Indeed, this was recognised in its earliest days. When the French physicist François Arago introduced the daguerreotype process to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839, he stated that one of the benefits of this new invention was that it would take just a short space of ti