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Roger Fenton

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Roger Fenton
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(born 1819, Heywood, Eng. — died Aug. 8, 1869, London) British photographer. In 1853 he helped found the Royal Photographic Society of London. In 1854 he was appointed the government's official photographer and sent to document the Crimean War. He shot some 360 photographs of the war; although they largely represent a glorified overview, showing very little of the real action or agony of war, they represent the first extensive photographic documentation of a war. On his return he exhibited successfully in London and Paris.

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Art Encyclopedia: Roger Fenton
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(b Bury, Lancs, March 1819; d London, 8 Aug 1869). English photographer. Born into a family of bankers and cotton merchants, he attended University College, London, in 1838 but left having been attracted to painting. After studying for a year with the historical genre painter Charles Lucy, he went to Paris in 1841 and entered the studio of Paul Delaroche. Delaroche, as early as 1839, had recognized the importance of the new daguerreotype for artists and followed the development of photography in the 1840s with interest.

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Photography Encyclopedia: Roger Fenton
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Fenton, Roger (1819-69), English, and one of the most influential and important photographers of the mid-19th century, exhibiting more widely and prolifically than any other of the period. His landscape and architectural studies were highly regarded and often referred to by critics as points of reference to which all other photographers should aspire.

Born at Crimble Hall, near Bury, Lancashire, he was the third son of John Fenton, banker, and MP for Rochdale. He attended University College London, graduating with a BA in 1840, before going on to study law intermittently for the remainder of the decade. He was called to the Bar in 1851. Despite this formal education, Fenton's real ambition was to become an artist, and using an inheritance from his grandfather he was able to train in both Paris and London, submitting three studies to the Royal Academy between 1848 and 1851. This training and experience distinguished Fenton's career as a photographer and set him apart from many of his contemporaries.

During this period photography emerged from infancy into precocious adolescence, full of hope, ambition, and ideals, with Fenton playing a crucial role in determining its character. He was able to do this in two ways: first, through his active involvement with the Photographic Society in London, of which he became honorary secretary at its formation in 1853; and, secondly, through the example of his own work that was widely exhibited throughout Britain and Europe. Unlike his contemporaries, Fenton never felt constrained to stick to one distinct photographic genre. Instead he moved freely from portraiture, narrative tableaux, documentary sequences, landscape and topographical studies, and elaborate still-life studies made in his studio. He used large-format plates to make impressive studies of architecture, and the stereoscopic camera for more intimate studies in the third dimension. Commercially his work occupied the top end of the market where it was widely sold by leading printsellers, most notably by Thomas Agnew & Sons, of Manchester and London, the firm that underwrote his expedition to photograph the Crimean War in 1855. This extensive body of photographs, made in just four months, contains a number of now iconic images, with the desolate and forbidding Valley of the Shadow of Death regarded as the most eloquent metaphor of warfare. Despite working in several genres, Fenton remained consistent in his love of the British landscape and the history it enfolded. Each summer he photographed in locations revered for their ruined abbeys, cathedrals, castles, romantic associations, and literary connotations. These are now considered to be among the finest architectural and topographical studies of the 19th century.

In October 1862 he announced his complete retirement from photography and had his apparatus and entire stock of over 1, 000 large-format negatives auctioned. With this decisive act he closed a remarkable and influential photographic career.

— Roger Taylor

Bibliography

  • Gernsheim, H. and A., Roger Fenton, Photographer of the Crimean War (1954).
  • Baldwin, G., Daniel, M., and Greenough, S. (eds.), All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton 1852-1860 (2004)
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Roger Fenton
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Fenton, Roger, 1819-69, English pioneer photographer. Originally a barrister, Fenton worked from the early 1850s until 1862 as a fashionable architectural, still-life, portrait, and landscape photographer. Aesthetically sensitive and technically adept, he was the most acclaimed and influential photographer in England during this period and did much to establish photography as both an art and a profession. Fenton had a strong interest in Orientalist subjects and he also made (1852) a series of photographs of Moscow and Kiev. Sponsored by the royal family, he was commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War. Working under appalling conditions, he made 360 photographs emphasizing the romantic aspects of an unpopular war. His few combat pictures are among the earliest photographs of battle.

Bibliography

See biography by H. and A. Gernsheim (1954); studies by J. Hannavy (1975), R. Pare (1987), and G. Baldwin et al. (2004).

Wikipedia: Roger Fenton
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Roger Fenton, self-portrait

Roger Fenton (20 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers.

Roger Fenton was born in Heywood, Lancashire. His grandfather was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and banker, his father a banker and Member of Parliament. Fenton was the fourth of seven children by his father's first marriage. His father had 10 more children by his second wife.

In 1838 Fenton went to University College London where he graduated in 1840 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, having studied English, mathematics, literature, and logic. In 1841, he began to study law at University College, evidently sporadically as he did not qualify as a solicitor until 1847, in part because he had become interested in studying to be a painter. In Yorkshire in 1843 Fenton married Grace Elizabeth Maynard, presumably after his first sojourn in Paris (his passport was issued in 1842) where he may briefly have studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche. When he registered as a copyist in the Louvre in 1844 he named his teacher as being the history and portrait painter Michel Martin Drolling, who taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but Fenton's name does not appear in the records of that school. By 1847 Fenton had returned to London where he continued to study painting now under the tutelage of the history painter Charles Lucy, who became his friend and with whom, starting in 1850, 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 visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in London in 1851 and was impressed by the photography on display there. He then visited Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype process, most likely from Gustave Le Gray, its inventor. By 1852 he had photographs exhibited in England, and travelled to Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg making calotypes there, and photographed views and architecture around Britain. His published call for the setting up of a photographic society was answered with its establishment in 1853; The Photographic Society, with Fenton as founder and first Secretary, later became the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.[1][2]

Marcus Sparling seated on Roger Fenton's photographic van, Crimea, 1855.

In 1855 Fenton went to the Crimean War on assignment for the publisher Thomas Agnew to photograph the troops, with a photographic assistant Marcus Sparling and a servant and a large van of equipment. Despite high temperatures, breaking several ribs, and suffering from cholera, he managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London. Sales were not as good as expected, possibly because the war had ended. According to Susan Sontag, in her work Regarding the Pain of Others (ISBN 0-374-24858-3) (2003), Fenton was sent to the Crimean War as the first official war photographer at the insistence of Prince Albert. The photographs produced were to be used to offset the general aversion of the British people to an unpopular war, and to counteract the antiwar reporting of The Times. The photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News and published in book form and displayed in a gallery. Fenton avoided making pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.

Valley of the Shadow of Death, with road full of cannonballs, by Roger Fenton, 1855
Valley of the Shadow of Death, with road cleared of cannonballs, by Roger Fenton, 1855

Due to the size and cumbersome nature of his photographic equipment, Fenton was limited in his choice of motifs. And because of the not very photosensitive material of his time, he was only able to produce pictures of unmoving objects, mostly posed pictures. But he also photographed the landscape, including an area near to where the Light Brigade - made famous in Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" - was ambushed, called The Valley of Death; however, Fenton's photographs were taken in the similarly named The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Modern photographers consider this picture, taken while under fire, to be a seminal piece of war photography.[3] Two pictures were taken of this area, one with several cannonballs on the road, the other with an empty road. Opinions differ concerning which one was taken first. Filmmaker Errol Morris wrote a series of essays canvassing the evidence. He concluded that the photo without the cannonballs was taken first, but he remained uncertain about who moved the balls onto the road in the second picture - were they deliberately placed on the road by Fenton to enhance the image, or were soldiers in the process of removing them for reuse? [4][5][6]

Seated Odalisque by Roger Fenton

Several of Fenton's pictures, including the two versions of The Valley of the Shadow of Death, are published in The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War by Ulrich Keller (ISBN 90-5700-569-7) (2001).

In 1858 Fenton made studio genre studies based on romantically imaginative ideas of Muslim life, such as Seated Odalisque, using friends and models who were not always convincing in their roles. Although well-known for his Crimean war photography, his photographic career lasted little more than a decade, and in 1862 he abandoned the profession entirely, selling his equipment and becoming almost forgotten by the time of his death seven years later. He was later formally recognised by art historians for his pioneering work and artistic endeavour.[1]

In recognition of the importance of his photography, Fenton's photos of the Crimean war were included in the LIFE collection, 100 Photos that Changed the World.

References

  1. ^ a b Library of Congress: Roger Fenton Crimean War Photographs
  2. ^ Royal Photographic Society
  3. ^ Morris, Errol (2007). A Filmmaker Uncovers the Hidden Truths of Photos New York Times 25 September 2007, accessed 2007-11-03
  4. ^ Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One) The New York Times. September 25, 2007.
  5. ^ Which Came First? (Part Two) The New York Times. October 4, 2007.
  6. ^ Which Came First? (Part Three) The New York Times. October 23, 2007.

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