Book excerpt: In the early 1850s, a British photographer arrived in San Francisco and became fascinated with the changing face of the city, which he captured in some of the earliest photographs on paper ever made in the United States. George Robinson Fardon's San Francisco Album documents a time of rapid growth and burgeoning prosperity in the wake of the California Gold Rush. As the earliest published photographic record of an American city, it is a work of both historic signficance and pioneering artistry.