Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, English, 1853-1941
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe was born in 1853 in Headingly, Leads, England.
He became active in photography around 1870, and established a studio
in the Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby, where he was very successful as
a carte de visite and portrait photographer. He wrote extensively about
photography and from 1908 until about 1930 had a column in the
Yorkshire Weekly Post and contributed several other articles to
magazines and newspapers, including Amateur Photography. Sutcliffe
was a distinguished photographer of his day and was a founding member
of The Linked Ring, as well as an Honorary Fellow of RPS. The first
photographer to have a one-man show held by the Camera Club in 1888, his
work was frequently exhibited and widely respected, as is demonstrated
by the sixty-two medals he received throughout his lifetime. Sutcliffe
experimented with many varieties of prints--albumen, silver, carbon and
platinum--and in his later years also did experimental photography for
Kodak, using their hand-held camera.
Although he was successful as a commercial photographer, Sutcliffe is
best known for his personal landscape and genre prints, which he took in
Whitby. He was influence by P. H. Emerson and early realist French
painters. Sutcliffe focused on the small-town inhabitants of
Whitby--the fisherman, farmers, their wives and their children at work
and at play. He is especially recognized as being able to capture
people in a natural, unposed state despite the fact that the slow
technique of wet plates that he often used made it difficult to do so. For
further information on Sutcliffe see Frank Meadow Sutcliffe , published by
Aperture with text by Michael Hiley.
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