Class 3 recap.

Last class we looked at some photographers working around mid 1850s through the later part of the 20th century who were either doing war photography or some sort of landscape themed excursion work (for both personal and sponsored projects) I tie these together because while obviously being very different, there is a similar sense of photographic uncharted history brought to the public by them. In the first class we talked about how photography was able to take the viewer to a place that before was only a description. This wasn't just relevant to travel photography; think of the devastating effects that showing images of war had on people who never experienced it.

Roger Fenton
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. While these photographs present a substantial documentary record of the participants and the landscape of the war, there are no actual combat scenes, nor are there any scenes of the devastating effects of war.

Fenton purchased a former wine merchant's van and converted it to a mobile darkroom. He hired an assistant, and traveled the English countryside testing the suitability of the van. In February 1855 Fenton set sail for the Crimea aboard the Hecla, traveling under royal patronage and with the assistance of the British government.

But Fenton shied away from views that would have portrayed the war in a negative (or realistic) light for several reasons, among them, the limitations of photographic techniques available at the time (Fenton was actually using state-of-the-art processes, but lengthy exposure time prohibited scenes of action); inhospitable environmental conditions (extreme heat during the spring and summer months Fenton was in the Crimea); and political and commercial concerns (he had the support of the Royal family and the British government, and the financial backing of a publisher who hoped to issue sets of photos for sale).

"...in coming to a ravine called the valley of death, the sight passed all imagination:



round shot and shell lay like a stream at the bottom of the hollow all the way down, you could not walk without treading upon them..."
--Roger Fenton

On first look, this image looks like a normal landscape photograph, it is only once you look close and realize the sheer amount of cannon balls that lay on what seems like a never ending road do you truly realize how this photo can say so much about a war without showing you any actual action from it.

More on Fenton and the Crimean War

1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives

Brady thought it would be a good idea to photograph the entire war and was sure the American government would later purchase his photos and he would at least make back the $100,000 or so he had invested in the project.

While Brady hired roughly 20 photographers such as Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan to work under him, part of the deal was that they could not attain any personal credit for their work and everything shot by them was to be signed as Mathew Brady.

This of course did not suit some of the photographers and they went on to branch off and do their own work without the supervision of Brady, who really didn't even shoot the actual war that much but was more in charge of the supervisions and organization of the project and more of the portraits associated with the war.



The war had come to an end in 1865 and by 1873 Brady was far in debt, having to sell off his New York studio. He did, however, manage to finally get the gvt. to buy his project for a whopping $2840...for those of you with minimal math skills that's a loss of $97,160.

Here are a couple video essays about Brady photos from a historian at the University of Iowa.





Many of the photographers hired by Brady, such as Alexander Gardner were unhappy with not being able to take credit for their work and went on to quit. Gardner had opened up his own studio in D.C. and kept working on the Civil War project without the assistance of Brady and actually had the Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, a two-volume collection of 100 original prints, published in 1866.



amongst the genuine pictures of the war there appear to be a few which are contrived, further proof that whilst people may think the camera cannot lie, the person behind it can! For example, when Gardner arrived at the decisive scene of the war at Gettysburg two days after it had been fought, he set about photographing "Home of a rebel sharpshooter." However, before taking the picture he had dragged the body of a Conferedate some thirty metres to where he lies in the picture, turning the head towards the camera.



So, does the camera ever lie? Well, as digital photography grows apace, almost anything is achieveable! But what of the past? Like any artist, a photographer may want to portray some emotion, evoke a reaction, put out a thought of his own. The lens sees what it sees, but what appears is inevitably subjective.

When Daguerre exclaimed that photography was "an absolute truth, infinitely more accurate than any painting by the human hand," he probably wasn't thinking of how photographers would be using this public perception to not only push their agenda but just as simply fool the public. While the war photographers of the time were not necessarily trying to do either, the facts are simple: photographing action in the 1860s was really hard, photos were staged, war scenes were tampered with for the sake of better photos.

Is this acceptable? Does the photographer have a right to do such a thing? Does it matter if the photograph is an absolute truth if it serves a greater purpose like changing people's perception of the world for a greater truth or is that too close to propaganda?

What about this recent controversy?

Timothy O'Sullivan - by 1870, ex brady photographers such as o'sullivan and william jackson headed west on government funded exhibitions to document landscapes. O'Sullivan approached western landscape with the documentarian's respect for the integrity of visible evidence and the camera artist's understanding of how to isolate and frame decisive forms and structures in nature.



A sense of mysterious silence and timelessness; these qualities may be even more arresting to the modern eye than they were to his contemporaries, who regarded his images as accurate records rather than evocative statements.

William Henry Jackson
His pictures helped convince the Congress of the United States to establish Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Active throughout the Western United States from 1870 to the early 1900s, Jackson had a long and illustrious career working for government survey parties and producing views that were sold by the thousands as postcards to the general public.



Jackson carried plates as large as 50 by 61 cm (20 by 24 in) into remote and mountainous regions now part of Colorado, Wyoming, and other Western states. His landscape pictures are sharp and dramatic, and helped influence many of the 20th century landscape photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams as well as set a precedent for postcard production.

william henry jackson collection

Library of congress info about photographing civil war