The First Millionaire Poster Boy?

A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853.Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions, the first of which was a trip to Egypt in 1856 with very large cameras (16" x 20"). He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions.

Frith's journeys resulted in a total of nine publications, including Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described by Francis Frith, a subscription series issued between 1858 and 1860, and Cairo, Sinai, Jerusalem, and the Pyramids of Egypt (1860). By 1859, Frith had earned enough to establish F. Frith & Co., which specialized in postcards of landscape and architectural views in Britain and the Middle East. After 1861, as he became more involved in the management of the company, Frith hired other photographers to provide views of Great Britain, Continental Europe, and the United States. F. Frith & Co. remained in business until 1968, long after his death.

Francis Frith was a successful entrepreneur and photographer whose topographical views responded to the high demand in the mid-nineteenth-century in England for pictorial evidence of Middle Eastern subjects.

He was so successful that he built a firm that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. Within a few years, over two thousand shops throughout the United Kingdom were selling his postcards.

His family continued the firm, which was finally closed in 1971. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain's first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and "at risk". Jay managed to persuade McCann-Erikson the London advertising agency to approach their client Rothmans of Pall Mall on 14 December 1971 to purchase the archive to ensure its safety. Rothmans went ahead and acquired the archive within weeks.

Frith was re-launched in 1975 as "The Francis Frith Collection" by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible.

On 25 August 1977, Buck bought the archive from Rothmans, and has run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. In 2016 the company completed a two-year project to scan the entire archive and now holds over 330,000 high resolution digital images. The company website enables visitors to browse all 330,000 Frith photographs, depicting some 7,000 cities, towns and villages.