Roger Fenton

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Col. Doherty, Officers & Men, 13th Light Dragoons by Roger Fenton, 1855

Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton, 1855

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

Roger Fenton was born March 28, 1819 at his father's house near Bury, Lancashire, not far from Rochdale. His grandfather was a wealthy Lancashire 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. (By his second he had ten more).

In 1838 he went up to University College London from which 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 (1786-1851), 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 (1814-1873), 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. He published a call for the setting up of a photographic society.

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 of his 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 came to an end. 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. Pictures produced were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News as well as being published in book form and displayed in a gallery. The War Ministry ordered Fenton to avoid pictures of dead, injured or mutilated soldiers.

Due to the size and cumbersome nature of photographic equipment of the times, Fenton was only able to produce pictures which had previously been posed. Only two of his photographs were not posed, and these were taken of an area near to where the Light Brigade - made famous in Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" - was ambushed, called The Valley of the Shadow of Death, although not in the same valley. Two pictures were taken of this area, the first being as Fenton found it and the second a rearranged scene with cannonballs and other wreckage and remains moved to create a more exciting image. Fenton may, therefore, have also been the first photographer to fake or falsify pictures. 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).

Seated Odalisque by Roger Fenton

In 1858 Fenton made studio genre studies based on romantically imaginative ideas of Muslim life, such as a Seated Odalisque (See Picture), using friends and models who were not always convincing in their roles.

Fenton is considered the first war photographer for his work during the Crimean War, for which he used a mobile studio called a "photographic van".