Born in London, Frederick Henry Evans (1853-1943) was a British photographer and writer who today is remembered for his striking architectural photographs of French and English cathedrals. Utilizing a straight, unmanipulated approach at a time when negative and print manipulation was popular, his exquisite images earned him the praise of his peers, who hailed him as “the greatest architectural photographer of all time.”

Evans took up photography in 1883 through the instruction of George Smith of the Sciopticon Company from whom he learned to make photomicrography or magnified images of tiny natural specimens before pursuing architectural, landscape and portrait photography. After working for a short time as a London clerk, Evans founded a bookshop that he ran successfully until 1898 at which time he retired from the book business to devote himself full time to photography and writing. He initially preferred to display his images as lantern slides that were projected onto a wall before switching exclusively to the platinum print by 1895 for its rich but delicate tonal range.

As the proprietor of his London bookshop, Evans encountered a variety of leading literary figures, many of whom he photographed from about 1890 until he sold the business in 1898. In 1899 he was invited to exhibit at the Architectural Club, Boston and in 1900 two achievements helped to consolidate his reputation: he was honored with his first one-man exhibition of 150 prints at the Royal Photographic Society in London and elected a member of the exclusive British Pictorialist society known as the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring. As the group’s “Idler,” or person in charge of organizing the annual Salon exhibition from 1902-05, he altered its display approach–introducing innovative mounting techniques that grouped the photos into cohesive displays by theme and style and showed relationships to the developing arts and crafts movement.

Similar to the aims of the Pictorialists in the Linked Ring, Evans sought to elevate photography to a fine art but rejected his colleagues’ stylistic emphasis on softly focused, painterly images that often required artistic manipulation of the negative. Instead, he advocated for straight photography and printed his negatives without retouching his contact prints.

Separating himself from the ranks of successful commercial photographers who took architectural views to sell to tourists, Evans did not simply record the architectural detail of his cathedrals but immersed himself into his subject matter to capture the monumental structures’ physical and emotional aspects. He would devote weeks photographing a cathedral and its surrounding town to determine the best angle and time of day for the resulting image to convey the building’s grand scale, beauty, and spiritual qualities that brought him to the attention of photographers in England and the United States.

In addition to exhibiting his work regularly, Evans also actively lectured at photographic clubs and contributed over 100 articles and essays on photography to British and American periodicals, including Amateur Photographer and Camera Work, throughout his career. He was the first British photographer that Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) published in his influential photography journal Camera Work, with the fourth issue devoted to Evans in October 1903. From 1904-1920, he also regularly photographed landscapes and estates in England and France for the weekly British magazine Country Living. With his health declining and platinum paper becoming scarce, Evans stopped creating his own work after World War I. In 1928 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, who also held a memorial retrospective and symposium on Evans in 1944, the year after his death.

More recently, he has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled to the National Media Museum in Bradford, England (2010-2011); and at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2015). His work can be found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Portland Art Museum; and Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others.