Roger Fenton and the Crimean War

Roger Fenton was one of the first pioneers of war photography. The images he took covering the Crimean War, along with the letters he wrote to his family and the Manchester print-seller Thomas Agnew (who financed this expedition), are rich with explicit and implicit information documenting the conflict. The tone of the letters is noteworthy. Although they were edited when published in 1954, Fenton’s sense of humor and intrepid spirit are readily apparent. He assumed the voice of an almost jaunty world traveler witnessing a spectacle that alternately amazed, amused, and horrified him, that complicated but never confounded his efforts, and that, while it provoked periods of sadness, never aroused deep moral indignation. It has been suggested that Fenton’s experience in the Crimea was far less negative in part because he did not arrive until the spring of 1855, when the devastating winter was over and some improvements had been made in conditions. He also carried letters of introduction from Prince Albert, which guaranteed him exceptional access and privilege. While Times journalist William Howard Russell was barely tolerated as a result of his criticisms of English and French leaders in the war effort, everywhere Fenton turned he received support and assistance from the highest- ranking officers in the region. Aided by an assistant and a handyman, Fenton began photographing within a few days of his March 8, 1855 landing at the port of Balaklava. Using two cameras, he worked diligently for three months, making more than 350 negatives. His purpose on this trip was to create a commercially viable portfolio of photographs aimed at the upper levels of British society. This audience, many of whom had lost family and friends in the conflict, did not want to see photographs of death, suffering, chaos, or ineptitude, or images that would challenge their closely held belief in the necessity and correctness of the conflict. They wanted pictures that supported the myth that

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their loved ones had died with dignity and in support of a noble cause. To this end, Fenton set out to photograph the leading figures of all the allied armies. He also made photo essays of camp life that show officers, often attended by aides and surrounded by their regiments, relaxing near their tents. And he made studies of the picturesque and exotic individuals who populated what he called “this Noah’s Ark”: the Highlanders in their colorful garb, the Grenadier Guards with a Nubian servant, a French cantinière, Russian children, the Zouaves, Croats, and Turkish soldiers. While the vast majority of the photographs Fenton made in the Crimea are portraits, he also recorded the densely packed harbor of Balaklava and the plateau of Sebastopol. There, he made several panoramas, including ones of the plain of Balaklava, the site of the Battle of Inkerman, and an eleven-part panorama of the view from Cathcart’s Hill. In short, Fenton’s subjects were the very people and places the English public had been reading about in newspaper reports for months. Fought far from English soil, the Crimean War was the first “armchair war,” experienced by the general public not through firsthand knowledge, or as an imminent threat, but through newspaper and journal articles. The rapid growth of the popular illustrated press and the increased availability of prints also made it the first war in which visual as well as printed information could be devoured by the public. Fenton’s Crimean expedition was one of the most difficult, complicated, and ambitious projects any photographer had undertaken. At times it was also dangerous; the Russians occasionally fired on his van and once even grazed it. Toward the end of his time in the Crimea, a new sense of war-weariness crept into his letters and portraits. As he worked his way down through the ranks, finally photographing junior officers and some noncommissioned soldiers—those who actually bore the brunt of the fighting—their exhausted and shattered state became ever more apparent. Precisely because the subjects did not try to hide their desperation and the photographer did not seek to transform them into something they were not, these are among Fenton’s most compelling Crimean portraits. -more- Page 3

If Fenton was a celebrity in the Crimea, he was an even greater one on his return to England. By early August 1855 the queen had seen some of his Crimean photographs and described them as “extremely well done.” In September, the exhibition “Photographic Pictures Taken in the Crimea,” consisting of more than 280 works by Fenton, opened at the Gallery of the Water-Colour Society in London. This was the first of three venues in London and more than seven elsewhere in Britain. The exhibition was a popular and critical success. Also that September, Agnew announced the publication of Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea, a series of three portfolios. Despite the high praise, the almost weekly appearance of Fenton’s work in the Illustrated News in the fall of 1855, and Agnew’s creative efforts to market the portfolios (including the claim that only a limited number of prints could be made from a negative), sales were poor. In December 1856, the negatives and remaining prints were sold at auction. But the impact of Fenton’s work survives, marking the beginning of a field that has become one of the most viable in photojournalism today. # # #

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