The Pyramids of Dahshoor, from the East

In 1856 Frith set out on the first of three trips to the Middle East, launching a highly successful career as a photographer and publisher of foreign topographic views. It is nothing short of a miracle that Frith succeeded in making photographs on this mammoth scale; the relatively new process utilizing glass negatives required him to transport his enormous camera, sheets of glass, and bottles of chemicals through the desert and to coat, expose, and develop his plates before the collodion emulsion dried. “With the thermometer at 110° in my tent,” wrote Frith, “the collodion actually boiled when poured upon the glass plate.” With local figures posed in the middle distance, Frith conveyed the vast expanse of the desert and the towering scale of the four-thousand-year-old pyramids at Dahshur.