Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, LACMA & Preus Museum

Francis Meadow (Frank) Sutcliffe (6 October 1853 – 31 May 1941) was an English pioneering photographic artist whose work presented an enduring record of life in the seaside town of Whitby, England, and surrounding areas, in the late Victorian era and early 20th century.
Sutcliffe, son of an artist, began taking photographs in 1871. Starting in 1872 he was employed by Francis Frith to take pictures of topographical prospects in Yorkshire. In 1875 he opened his own portrait studio in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, but it did not especially succeed. A year later he settled in Whitby, where he began to photograph portrayals of people and places in and around the city.
These portrayals made him known. Influenced by Peter Henry Emerson and contemporary French painters, he began taking naturalistic photographs. The pictures are precisely composed after the artistic norms of the time even though they can be considered as documentary descriptions of fishermen, farmers, women and children at work or at leisure. Sutcliffe was a popular exhibitor in England and elsewhere, and he received innumerable prizes. He was the first photographer given an exhibition by the Camera Club of London in 1888 and was among the founders of Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1892, even though he didn't attend a meeting until 1901 because Whitby was far from London.
Between 1903 and 1933 Sutcliffe actively wrote for and contributed to the Yorkshire Weekly Post and The Amateur Photographer. He also was a writer for the magazine of the Photo-Club de Paris, La Revue de Photographie in 1903.