Samuel Smith was a successful timber merchant who retired from business and moved to Wisbech, Cambridgeshire in the late 1840s. He took up photography in the early 1850s, using his camera and the 'paper negative' process to systematically record Wisbech during a period of dramatic growth and change. Although Smith's work was confined to barely more than a decade of his long life - he lived to be 90 - he is regarded as one of the pioneers of documentary photography.