The 19th Century

Task:

Research the use of photography to document war and conflict in the 19th Century.

In this task I will be researching the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The Crimean War was the first war to be documented through photography, and lasted from 1853 to 1856 between the Russian Empire and the French/ British alliance. Although Roger Fenton is considered the first official war photographer, the actual first war photographer known by name was a surgeon in the infantry.

"The first war photographer known by name was an amateur: John MacCosh, a British surgeon with the Bengal infantry." 1

 However although Fenton was not the first, he was certainly one of the most prominent. He shot over 360 photographs during his stay in the Crimea, and was financed and commissioned by a firm of Manchester publishers hoping to exploit the pictures commercially.

By 1854 Fenton was well known as an artist after devoting his time to professional photography and was known for his landscape and portrait photography. The technology at the time and the way photographs were devloped meant that a photographer would need to to transport his processing equipment where ever he went.

"However, the wet-plate method had one major inconvenience: the glass plate for the negative had to be sensitized immediately before exposure and developed immediately after. For optimum quality the plate had to be damp during exposire and if it dried before development had taken place the clarity was also impaired. This meant that a photographer had to transport a complete darkroom whenever he went out to take pictures." 2

Figure 1, The Artist's Van, Roger Fenton

 However because of this huge, bulky carriage, Fenton could not document any real battle scenes- and as well because his exposure times were long, almost all of his photographs were posed.

"His exposures had to last between 3 and 20 seconds, even in the best summer light- long enough to blur the slightest movement. Thus, Fenton had to pose virtually every shot." 3

Figure 2, Shadow of the Valley of Death, 1854, Roger Fenton

This image, Shadow of the Valley of Death, is perhaps one of the most recognised of Fenton's photographs from the Crimean war. It shows the cannonballs strewn across the valley, and apparently sums up the horror and ravages of the war within this one image.

The American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865 and was documented in full thanks to the efforts of Mathew B. Brady and his team. This time around there was no careful posing of photographs or nicely presented, censored shots. Brady exposed the war in full with over twenty other photographers which he organised throughout the war.

Figure 3, Collecting the remains of the dead at Cold Harbor, American Civil War, Mathew B. Brady

 This kind of photograph would never have been taken in the Crimean war. Photos like this were very very real, hard hitting and shocking to the American public.

"Brady and his men photographed everything- bridges, bivouacs, dead and wounded, guns and fortifications, ruined cities, hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps, as well as many portraits of soldiers and generals alike." 4

Unfortunately the war photographs were still not as popular as artist's renditions of epic battles in newspapers of the time, again because of the technological limitations of the camera equipment and the artists inability to get to the front line as much as they would have liked. The war photographs looked too dead and still, with no animation or character to them, and so they remained unpopular in mass culture until WWII.

"Looking at issues of magazines and journals of that period, one finds that the photographs indeed look tame and dull, even lifeless, in comparison with the artists' versions. Only in the Second World War did the photographer start to produce sufficiently powerful and dramatic pictures to make the artist-illustrator obsolete." 5

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 The Artists Van, Roger Fenton, HANNAVY, J. Roger Fenton, The Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd, 1975 p. 51
Figure 2 Shadow of the Valley of Death, 1854, Roger Fenton, LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, Chartwell Books INC, 1986, p. 38
Figure 3 Collecting the remains of the dead at Cold Harbor, Mathew B. Brady LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, Chartwell Books INC, 1986, p. 48

References

[1] LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, p. 37
[2] LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, p. 39
[3] LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, p. 39
[4] LEWINSKI, J. The Camera at War, p. 44

Bibliography

HAVVANY, J. Roger Fenton, (1975) The Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd.
LEWINSKY, J. The Camera at War, (1987) Book Sales, London