Robert Capa, the archetypical modern war photographer, once famously declared, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Good advice, though it didn’t apply to Roger Fenton, the godfather of the genre, who documented the Crimean War in 1855. That’s not just because he had to haul large cameras and unwieldy glass plate negatives (since fast Leica rangefinders had yet to be invented), but also because he shied away from photographing subjects that are now common: As a proper English gentleman, he wouldn’t photograph the corpses of soldiers, because doing so was unseemly.
Relying on long exposures made it impossible for Mr. Fenton to stop action and capture actual battles. But he did give the British public a view of the war by portraying the lives of British enlisted men and officers, as well as showing the armaments, supply routes and the many, many horses that were the critical military transportation technology of the day. He lived among the troops and traveled in a photo truck that doubled as his darkroom while photographing Russia’s defeat by an alliance that included Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire.
Three hundred and fifty of his images are now collected in “Shadows of War: Roger Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855” by Sophie Gordon with contributions by Louise Pearson. The volume offers a more comprehensive view of his work beyond the dozen or so images familiar to the public.
Before the war, Mr. Fenton, a lawyer from a well-to-do family, was already renowned for his technical abilities and his close association with the royal family, which resulted in several historic portraits. A co-founder of the Royal British Photographic Society, he was also an accomplished landscape photographer, a skill he employed often in Crimea.
The book notes that Mr. Fenton covered the war thanks to a commission by the publisher Thomas Agnew and Sons to photograph as many of the officers as possible so that Thomas Barker could use the images as the basis for paintings. Other sources have suggested he was more motivated by the Duke of New Castle, Prince Albert, and other patrons who wanted photographs that could help shape British public opinion about the war. The conflict with Russia was already well-chronicled in words, including Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Mr. Fenton reportedly broke several ribs in a fall and contracted cholera while in Crimea but he still managed to make about 360 useable photographs. Like almost all of the conflict photographers who have followed, he documented from just one side of the battlefield.
And like with modern-day conflict photography, the relationship between aesthetics and truth is an issue. Mr. Fenton’s image “Valley of the Shadow of Death” (after the Tennyson poem) (Slide 12) was the first iconic war photograph — and it is believed to have been staged.
He took two photographs of the scene — one with cannonballs littering the road and the other with the cannonballs by the roadside. Writers and scholars remain uncertain as to which was taken first, but either way someone moved the cannonballs between exposures. If it was the photographer, then the image would also be the first — of many — staged war photo.
He brought the plates back to England and as many as two million people, most paying an admission of one shilling saw the subsequent exhibits throughout Britain, according to the author. They were a critical and popular success, but Mr. Fenton apparently made little money from the enterprise. While he continued to photograph for several years, including sittings with the royal family, he became disillusioned with the commercialization of photography and sold his camera equipment in 1863 and returned to practicing law.
Like many later war photographers Mr. Fenton left the battlefield affected by the deaths he had witnessed. He might have been the first war photographer who turned his back on the craft, but he was certainly not the last.
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