FREDERICK H. EVANS At the turn of the century, when it was universally felt that the only way photography could hope to gain recognition as an art was by the most elaborate manipulation of negative and print, Frederick Henry Evans, a retired London bookseller, practiced and preached a doctrine of pure photography. He specialized in architectural, portrait and landscape subjects because he believed that they were most suited to interpretation by the camera. He developed his negatives mechanically, and printed them, without retouching of any kind, by contact on platinum paper, which he chose because of its ability to reproduce the rich tonal scale of the negative. He exhibited frequently and wrote extensively, with a result that his style was widely imitated, even plagiarized. His contemporaries hailed him as the greatest architectural photographer of all time, yet were perplexed and baffled by his seemingly endless preaching of a gospel of "the straightest of straight photography," which they felt limited the expressive potential. He was a relentless self-critic, obstinate, often opinionated, sometimes unreasonable, and always impatient with those who could not comprehend his "painful worryings and gropings after the ever-fleeting phantom of Perfection." (from "Frederick H. Evans" by Beaumont Newhall)