Interior of Ely Cathedral

A lifelong interest in the beautiful led London bookseller Frederick H. Evans to photography around 1885. He spent some 20 years photographing French and English cathedrals, working meticulously “to suggest the vastness, the grandeur of mass, the leading on from element to element, that so fascinates one in going through a cathedral.” For his views of the medieval Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, Evans requested that all modern furniture and fixtures be removed. At a time when most artist-photographers manipulated their prints to achieve a painterly effect, Evans preferred to stage a scene “naturally,” then to create straightforward images and print them in platinum, which gives more precise visual information. Despite this, Pictorialist organizations and artists embraced his work. The Linked Ring, a British Pictorialist society, elected him to join their ranks, and Alfred Stieglitz featured Evans’s cathedral views in Camera Work, making Evans the first English contributor to that American publication.