The Beginning and the End of the World
St. Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography

A celebration of St. Andrews, the first town in the English-apeaking world to have it's people, buildings, and natural environment documented through photography. This imaginative and readable book the pioneers of Scottish photography within their extraordinary and eccentric intellectual lives.

In a work of spectacular imagination and remarkable synthesis, Robert Crawford celebrates St Andrews, the first town in the English-speaking world to have its people, buildings and natural environment thoroughly documented through photography. The Beginning and the End of the World tells the stories of several pioneering Scottish photographers. Yet it also places them within the extraordinary intellectual life of an eccentric society rich in sometimes apocalyptically-minded Victorian inventors and authors whose work has had an international impact.