First War Photographers----Roger Fenton

Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers.

Born in 1819 near Rochdale in Lancashire, Fenton moved to London at the age of nineteen to study law. But during the 1840s he changed direction, and decided to study painting. Like many British artists, Fenton decided to take up photography after seeing examples of the new art form at the Great Exhibition in 1851. He trained in Paris with a leading photographer, and was making his first successful photographs by February 1852.

In 1854, long-standing tensions over Russian expansion in Europe erupted into war. England and France allied with the Ottoman Turks, and attacked Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula (part of modern-day Ukraine). Fenton was commissioned to document the conflict.

Fenton was the first to use photography to document war. He didn’t focus on the fighting: images of the dead and wounded would have offended his intended customers. Instead he photographed the port of Balaklava, the camps and officers of the British and French armies, and the Zouaves, Turks, and Croats.

Fenton's war pictures, therefore, tend to portray war as a gorgeous pageant; there are no dead bodies, and one might almost imagine that the Crimean war was almost like a picnic. There are no action shots (this for technical reasons), but those of soldiers are carefully posed groups, almost as if they were cricketers just about to go in to bat. It is this bias which makes one question slightly whether he was a true war photographer in the same league as the Mathew Brady team. Moreover, as an agent of the government, his portrayals were somewhat slanted; the charge of the Light Brigade, for example, was one disaster that was depicted as a glorious event.

The picture shows an area of Balaklava.

Resources Related to:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Fenton
2. http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/fenton.htm