The writer George Bernard Shaw said of his friend Frederick Evans's work: "Mr. Evans has set a standard in photography that most of us find entirely impossible to live up to. He is a gentleman who has dedicated himself to an art which is disparaged by those who believe that when a lens is in a box it is mechanical, but not when it is in a man's head."
Evans, a bookseller by trade, distinguished himself as a photographer of landscapes and architecture. He became a member of the British Linked Ring society of photographers in 1900 or 1901 and was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1928. Evans was the first British photographer whose work Alfred Stieglitz published in Camera Work, his influential journal of photography. Like his friend and fellow bookseller Fred Holland Day, Evans preferred the results achieved with the platinum print; and, like Day, he gave up photography after World War I when the precious metal became prohibitively expensive and was eventually no longer available for photographic purposes.
Selected text courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum
SELECTED COLLECTIONS:
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia