[Pyramids from the Southwest, Giza]

Beginning in the 1850s, photographers found a way to achieve the clarity of daguerreotypes without giving up the reproducibility inherent in Talbot's process: they replaced the paper negative with glass, which they coated with a thin layer of wet photosensitive collodion (guncotton dissolved in ether.) For large-format landscape work such as Frith produced in the Egyptian desert, the physical demands of the process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Frith's glass negatives had to be the same size he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed before the emulsion dried. The crystalline clarity and classic probity of Frith's remarkable "mammoth" prints are expressive of the nineteenth century's romantic fascination with the exotic and its enthusiasm for fact gathering and documentation.