As one of the first men to devote his life and creative energy to
photography, Frank Sutcliffe moved away from the confines of Victorian
photographic conventions, which were based on artifice, and set himself
the task of photographing the people and the countryside that he saw
around him in as truthful and straightforward a manner as his equipment
would allow. Despite his rarely leaving Whitby, Sutcliffe's work was
known, exhibited and copied all over the world. Michael Hiley has traced
Sutcliffe's writings on photography, many of which are to be found only
in newspaper archives and specialist photographic libraries. As the son
of a painter, Sutcliffe was aware both of the unique qualities of
photography and of the debt it owed to painting. The years of his
greatest success were years of unprecedented upheaval in both painting
and photography, and this book sets out to establish the relationship
between Sutcliffe's work and that of the leading photographers and
painters of his time.