The Mother of Creativity
DUST MAGAZINE, 2016
Considered “the first modern war’ by many historians, the Crimean War was two years and four months of the British, French, Ottoman Turks and Sardinians fighting the Russians, mainly on the northern edge of the Black Sea, in the Crimean Peninsula, but also in the Anatolia (today Northern Turkey), Caucasus, the Baltic and White Seas and in the Pacific Ocean.
Czar Nicholas I of Russia wanted to take the Black Sea from the Ottomans, as all the Russian controlled seas froze over during the winter. Naturally, the Ottomans disapproved, and British politicians wanted to keep the Russian fleet away from the Mediterranean and Constantinople. Napoleon III started a crusade in the Holy Lands to secure the support of the influential Catholic interests while the Sardinians wanted French and British support to remove the ruling Austrians from their homeland.
For the first time in the Crimea, military forces used mass-produced guns, exploding shells, sea mines and armoured coastal assault vessels with long-range cannons. The fighting ceased when the new Russian Emperor, Alexander II, decided to sign a peace treaty at the Congress of Paris in 1856.
Roger Fenton took a horse-drawn 'Photographic Van' to the Crimea to carry his equipment and act as a darkroom. Most of the photographs depict individuals and groups of soldiers, some obviously posed, others in a more 'natural' pose. Fenton's work in the Crimea was commissioned by art dealers and print publishers Thomas Agnew & Sons and assisted by royal patronage. He was not allowed to photograph dead bodies or horrifying scenes, partly because of the sensibilities of the victorian public at home and partly because he was tasked by Henry Pelham-Clinton, the duke of newcastle, and also acting secretary of state for war to give convincing proof of the well-being of the troops after the disasters of the preceding winter.
Roger Fenton’s photographic documentation of a conflict included, the camps, the port of Balaklava, the terrain of battle, and many portraits of officers and soldiers. Perhaps inspired by the experience of traveling through Constantinople en route to Balaklava, or just sharing the mid-nineteenth-century vogue for all exotic things, Fenton produced a theatrical set of Orientalist compositions, costume pieces that recall the paintings of Delacroix and Ingres. This set of photographs endeavored toward high art rather than documentation and perhaps functioned for Fenton as a sort of antidote to the harsh realities he had recorded in the Crimea.
In the acknowledged 'first iconic war photograph' entitled The Valley of the Shadow of Death, art historians have concluded that Roger Fenton may have moved the cannonballs into the road to enhance the image. Across a featureless and desolate landscape, not a single figure can be seen. The landscape is inhabited only by cannonballs that stand in for the human victims on the battlefield. The sense of emptiness and discomfort is intensified by the visual uncertainty created by the changing scale of the road and the inclined sides of the valley.
Referring to the Twenty-third Psalm of the Bible, British soldiers named the location “The Valley of Death,” It was a specific place where they came under constant bombardment. Fenton traveled to that valley twice, and on his second visit he made two exposures writing in his letters that he had intended to move in closer at the site, but felt he was in danger so he had to retreat back up the road where he took the famous photograph.
How did Fenton balance the demands of aesthetics and documentary truth? This is a challenge faced by many photographers, photojournalists and picture editors: creating attractive and evocative images without compromising their authenticity. Most people seem to agree that photojournalists should be held to higher standards than casual photographers when it comes to issues like digitally adding or removing elements of an image. This is not all; what about color balance or exposure or even shadow adjustment?
One must remember that Fenton while often being hailed as the first war photographer was employed at a time where there was much ambiguity between photography as an art and photography as a technical function. He was also commissioned by a mixture of art dealers and print publishers Thomas Agnew & Sons as well as Royal Patronage so there was a mixture of varying interests. His work did have a profound effect on war photography in the future and is very relevant today considering recent events in the field.
Changes in camera technology and photographic processes have profoundly influenced war photography, from the first photographed war to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, even before digital, photographers made many of the same decisions about how their images should look.
There are many ethical questions raised for people whose job it is to collect and process documentary images. How much adjustment can be performed before a photograph stops being representative of objective reality in front of the camera? Is the concept of objectivity in photojournalism actually attainable? The most recent debate about Paul Hansen’s winning World Press Photo image has shown a considerable amount of post production. This controversy over image post production is symptomatic of the current state of photojournalism and its place in a society that has learned not to trust what it sees. Indeed, complex and multifaceted events are impossible to portray completely. Photographs are small glimmers of light that the authors deemed precious enough to freeze in time for the world to see.
From Homer’s Iliad to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and even to Goya’s The Horrors of War, our seemingly innate impulse to destroy each other has been the source of inspiration for some of the greatest works of art. This is not surprising if we think that no activity of humankind engages our emotions as totally as war. War places societies and individuals in the most extreme of situations and, thereafter, provokes the most extreme responses, both bad and good.