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

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.

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

"The kind of intellectually fleet-footed work only a poet and critic could produce." –Scotland on Sunday