Born in Derbyshire of a Quaker family, Frith was apprenticed in his youth to a Sheffield cutlery firm before starting a wholesale grocery in Liverpool and establishing a printing firm. This latter was successful enough to allow him to retire at 35. Frith had taken up photography in 1850 and from the mid-1850s travelled in Africa and the Middle East. He first visited Egypt in September 1856-July 1857, exploring the Nile region from Cairo to Abu Simbel. The series of photographs from this exhibition was published in 1857 and established his reputation as a photographer. In October 1857 he returned to Egypt in the company of his assistant Frank Good, and again in 1859 when he travelled beyond the Sixth Cataract, some 1500 miles below the Delta. Frith travelled with 3 different cameras - a stereo apparatus, an 8 x 10 inch and a 16 x 20 inch camera for larger views. The bulkiness of such cameras was further compounded by the difficulties of processing. Using the wet collodion process, which entailed coating, exposing and developing the large glass plates while still wet, Frith's was a major photographic achievement and his description of his hardships indicates some of the problems encountered by all photographers until the advent of the dry collodion process in the 1870s:

'The difficulties which I had to overcome in working collodion, in those hot and dry climates, were also very serious. When (at the Second Cataract, one thousand miles from the mouth of the Nile, with the thermometer at 110° in my tent) the collodion actually boiled when pouring upon the glass plate, I almost despaired of success. By degrees, however, I overcame this and other difficulties; but suffered a good deal throughout the journey from the severe labour rendered necessary by the rapidity with which every stage of the process must be accomplished in climates such as these; and from excessive perspiration, consequent on the suffocating heat of a small tent, from which every ray of light, and consequently every breath of air, was necessarily excluded'.

On his return to England, Frith went into business as a publisher and photographer, issuing in addition to volumes of his own Egyptian and Middle Eastern photographs reprographical views of England and Europe. The company produced vast numbers of photographs and post cards, in all formats from their Reigate premises, and were for many years the largest mass production photographic company in Europe. Their topographical and architectural collections of views of the British Isles were particularly extensive and form a valuable historical source in the present day.