Photographer: Roger Fenton (1819-1869)
Roger Fenton was a British photographer, and one of the first war photographers. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament. Fenton graduated from the University of Oxford in 1840 with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1841 he began reading law at University College, and qualified as a solicitor in 1847. During this time he also became interested in learning to be a painter, and may have briefly studied in Paris in the studio of Paul Delaroche. He registered as a copyist in the Louvre in 1844, and by 1847 had returned to London where he continued to study painting under the tutelage of the history painter Charles Lucy with whom he served on the board of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling. In 1849, 1850 and 1851 he exhibited paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy.
Fenton was impressed with the photography he saw on display at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, and visited Paris to learn the wax paper calotype process, most likely from Gustav Le Gray. By 1852 he had had photographs exhibited in Britain, and had travelled to Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as photographing views and architecture around Britain. Fenton established the Photographic Society in 1853, which later became the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.
Work: Crimean War
It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons - among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War - urged Fenton to go to the Crimea to record the happenings. He arrived in Balaklava on the 8th of March, and remained there until the 22nd of June. It is thought the photographs were intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war with the public, converted into woodblocks and published in the Illustrated London News. For the project, Fenton took along a photographic assistant, a servant, and a large horse-drawn van of equipment.
Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs due to the photographic material of his time needing long exposures. He was only able to take pictures of stationary objects; indeed, it is remarkable that he was able to achieve what he did - over 300 photographs showing scenes of camp life, portraits of commanders and heroes, panoramas of sights of battles and carefully posed tableaux vivants – the beginnings of a long tradition of ‘staged’ war images. His letters and diary reveal that he saw plenty of evidence of the horrors of war, although he chose not to photograph corpses due to the government’s will for Fenton’s photographs to counteract the negative reports of military mismanagement. Taking into account the concerns of Fenton’s royal patrons, coupled with the need to create images that would have some commercial potential, it is hardly surprising that he chose not to record the full horror of war. It is because he only took ‘positive’ images of the war, that some critics do not consider Fenton to be a true war photographer.
Fenton photographed the landscape, including a place near to where ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ took place. The soldiers of the battle had referred to the original valley as ‘The Valley of Death’ – Tennyson’s poem about the event had used the same phrase. Thomas Agnew put Fenton’s picture on show, and assigned it and expanded version of the epithet – ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’ – a deliberate evocation of Psalm 23.
Two images where taken in the aforementioned area, one with an empty road, and one which had cannonballs strewn across the same road. Opinions differ regarding which image was taken first, although there is evidence to suggest the picture with the empty road was first. It is suggested that either Fenton placed the cannonballs in the road to add dramatic impact to his image.
During the trip Fenton made 350 usable large format negatives after enduring high summer temperatures, breaking several ribs in a fall and suffering from cholera as well as becoming depressed at the carnage he witnessed at Sevastopol. 312 prints were soon on show in London and elsewhere in the country, and Fenton showed them to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and also to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. Nevertheless, sales were not as good as expected.
Undaunted by the lack of commercial success for his Crimean photographs, Fenton remained driven with great energy to perfect his art and to record meaningful and artistic images. He travelled widely over Britain to record landscapes and still life images, but as time moved on, photography was becoming more accessible. Many, with sufficient knowledge and also the hunger to develop business, sought to profit from selling quick portraits to common people. Fenton fell into conflict with many of his peers who were willing, as Fenton saw it, ‘to cheapen their art’ for profit.
In 1862 the organising committee for the International Exhibition in London announced its plans to place photography, not with the other fine arts as had been done in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition only five years earlier, but in the section reserved for machinery, tools and instruments - photography was considered a craft, for tradesmen. For Fenton and many of his colleagues, this was conclusive proof of photography's diminished status, and the pioneers drifted away. In 1863, Fenton sold his equipment and returned to the law as a barrister on the Northern Circuit.
Fenton died 8 August 1869 at his home in Potter's Bar, Hertfordshire after a week-long illness, at the age of 50.
References
Harding, C. (2012). Photographing Conflict: Roger Fenton And The Crimean War - National Media Museum. [online] National Media Museum. Available at: http://blog.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/remembrance-day-part-1-photographing-war-fenton-crimean/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].
Wikipedia. (2016). Roger Fenton. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fenton [Accessed 5 Jul. 2016].
No comments:
Post a Comment