The Signet Library 200th Anniversary Online Exhibition

signet library collection guides

the thomas annan collection of early photography

6. The Alexander Mitchell ws Album

Photograph Album compiled on behalf of Alexander Mitchell WS (1833-1902) by an unknown photographic studio, 1874. Presented to the Signet Library by the legal firm Morton Fraser and Milligan in 1970

Although Alexander Mitchell was a photograher in his own right (he was a longstanding member of the pioneering Edinburgh Photographic Society) the photographs in this luxurious album are not his. Rather, the album comprises a compilation of pictures produced at the Reigate factory of Francis Frith, and are a good cross-section of the images Frith and his team had produced in the United Kingdom and especially in Egypt and the Middle East. Although the reference numbers accompanying the prints are clearly Frith's, not all are represented in available lists. Frith had been travelling abroad for professional photographic purposes since the 1850s, and these may not have been new images by 1874. But they give an insight into the nature of the demand for photographs in the mid-Victorian period. The copious annotations are believed to be Alexander Mitchell's own.