Steps into Chapter House, Wells Catheral

Frederick Evans ran a successful bookstore before devoting his attention solely to photography in 1898, soon gaining recognition for photographs of medieval cathedrals in England and France that seemed to capture the soul of the building. A fastidious artisan, Evans had high standards for artistic presentation and shunned altering an image after exposure. He would study the light in cathedrals for weeks to create the precise effect that he sought to underscore in the pictorial sensitivity of the subject.

This photograph represents Evans’s second of three separate attempts to perfectly portray Wells Cathedral’s “veritable sea of steps,” of which he wrote, “it is one of the most imaginative lines it has been my good fortune to try and depict.” Taken from a low vantage point, the image captures the curved cascade of steps in the soft glow of illumination, their worn, undulating lines caught in an expressive balance of light and shadow, heightened by the subtle, velvety tones of the platinum print process.