COVE

Roger Fenton could very well have argued consistently with his previous writings and talks that a field with cannon balls invites the “disposition of mind” to imagine horrors as well as nobility (“Abstract” 52). Ironically, he might be far more modern than his critics claim of him and also his images, including number 218, the famous “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” No drama other than with association, but for contemporaries that was a powerful association, one which would leave the viewer of the camera’s work with, in Fenton’s terms expressed in 1852, “the exercise of judgment, the play of fancy, and the power of invention.” He claimed in his paper read before the Photographic Society that photography was not “a kind of power-loom,” but also not like a drawing, or at least full drawing (Ibid 51). Photographic images from the Crimea, particularly the landscapes, were more like poems: the less one wrote, the more one could read into them. It was the absence of images that mattered, or the combination of “the most faithful transcript of nature” and “the play of fancy.” After all, as Fenton claimed, “[e]very disposition of mind has its bodily expression,” including dispositions about war and peace (Ibid 52).

Among other historians and critics, Reuel Golden remarked that “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” “is a picture almost bereft of information about the battle itself.” He and his colleagues are, in one sense correct, but they also might be missing the sense that war was not only battles for at least some mid-Victorians (“Roger Fenton” 74). Cannonballs on the ground are not intended to tell an unproblematic narrative, unlike the goals of propaganda. Rather, images such as that one invite, if not demand, the viewer to ponder what had happened to put those cannon balls where they are now. Into that imagination, or that void, would run preconceptions about landscape, the Crimea and warfare itself. Perhaps Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, "Charge of the Light Brigade," might even help fill that apparent blank slate? (Groth, “Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere,” passim). Fenton understood that the photographic image did not deny, but invited the information and imagination which viewers bring to the image, including those men, women and children who toured the first exhibition of war photography in 1855 as they consumed the many representations of the Crimean War available to them.

Medium: photographic print : salted paper ; 28 x 36 cm.

Call Number/Physical Location: PH - Fenton (R.), no. 218 (A size) [P&P], Library of Congress

Source Collection: Fenton, Roger, 1819-1869. Roger Fenton Crimean War photograph collection

Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Digital Id: ppmsca 35546 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.35546cph 3g09217 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g09217cph 3a06028 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a06028

Library of Congress Control Number: 2001698869

Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-35546 (digital file from original item) LC-USZC4-9217 (color film copy transparency) LC-USZ62-2322 (b&w film copy neg.)

Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.

LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/2001698869

Rights & Access: The contents of the Library of Congress Fenton Crimean War Photographs are in the public domain and are free to use and reuse. Credit Line: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Fenton Crimean War Photographs.

Works Cited

Fenton, Roger. “Abstract of ‘On the Present Position and Future Prospects of the Art of Photography’.” Journal of the Society of Arts 1:5 (24 December 1852): 50-53.

Golden, Reuel. “Roger Fenton.” Photojournalism 1855 to the Present. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2009, 74-79.

Groth, Helen. “Technological Mediations and the Public Sphere: Roger Fenton’s Crimea Exhibition and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30:2 (2002): 553-570.