All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860

Afterimage, March-April, 2005 by Joanne Lukitsh

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

WASHINGTON, DC

OCTOBER 17, 2004-JANUARY 2, 2005

J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

FEBRUARY 1, 2005-APRIL 24, 2005

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

MAY 24, 2005-AUGUST 21, 2005

THE TATE GALLERY

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

SEPTEMBER 21, 2005-JANUARY 2, 2006

ALL THE MIGHTY WORLD: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF ROGER FENTON, 1852-1860, BY GORDON BALDWIN, MALCOLM DANIEL AND SARAH GREENOUGH, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY RICHARD PARE, PAM ROBERTS AND ROGER TAYLOR NEW HAVEN AND LONDON: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004/304 PP./$65 (HB)

In the 1850s the Victorian photographer Roger Fenton (1819-1869) took the new technology of wet-plate photography to high levels of artistic achievement and public visibility. In that decade Fenton was England's preeminent landscape and architectural photographer and a founder and leader of the Photographic Society, which was organized for the advancement of the medium. He enjoyed a lucrative government contract to make reproductions of the collections of the British Museum, took portraits of the Royal Family at Windsor and at their country home in Scotland and traveled to the Crimea to record the participants and sites of a controversial war. But in the early 1860s, when commercial production of photographs became dominant, he quit.

The general course of Fenton's involvement with the medium was not unique to his era, though the story is better known in France--for example, the histories of Nadar and Gustave Le Gray, among others--than in England. The nine essays and extensive bibliographic information in the exhibition catalog for "All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860" concentrate on Fenton's artistic subjects, such as landscape and still-life, but also consider his authorship within the social, commercial and institutional conditions of the period. Intensely ambitious and keen to better any photographer who challenged his renown, Fenton continued the tradition of English nationalism in his imagery, but the touring exhibition which recently opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (in galleries newly dedicated to photography) does not place his work in a broad enough context of English visual culture, although individual essays in the catalog make this effort.

Sarah Greenough's biographical essay. "A New Starting Point: Roger Fenton's Life," reviews Fenton's early activities, beginning with his upbringing in a family of wealthy industrialists outside of Manchester. Fenton studied law but pursued painting as a young adult, first in London and then in Paris at the popular atelier of the academic painter Michel-Martin Drolling. Notices of the work Fenton exhibited at the Royal Academy after his return to England imply an interest in accessible genre scenes. Greenough discusses an affiliation with Pre-Raphaelitism, but it is doubtful that Fenton shared the Pre-Raphaelites' then-controversial goals for artistic reform. Instead, in 1851. Fenton charted his own course. Most likely inspired by the international display of photographs at the Crystal Palace exhibition that year, he returned to Paris to study negative-positive photography at Le Gray's studio and to learn about the Societe Heliographique, which sponsored meetings, research and publications on the medium. Meanwhile, in England, Fenton's swift rise to public prominence as spokesperson for the medium--he lectured at the first public exhibition of photography in Britain in 1852--implies that photography was a much better match than painting for his artistic abilities, ambition and social skills.

Greenough organizes her survey of Fenton's photography into four periods. Between 1851 and 1854 Fenton worked to establish himself as a leading figure in the Photographic Society, secured an appointment as the first photographer at the British Museum and began an influential association with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. With their support, Fenton made a photographic expedition to the Crimea in 1855, where he took over 350 photographs of soldiers, officers and scenes of the war--a project that made him famous. Between 1856 and 1859 Fenton took some of his most important artistic photographs and undertook several (unsuccessful) ventures to market his images. In the concluding section, Greenough describes the conflicts that led to Fenton's retirement from photography in 1862 and his return to a law practice that he maintained until his death in 1869.

As a whole, the catalog's coverage of Fenton's career is uneven. There are no essays specifically devoted to Fenton's photography in the Crimea or his work at the British Museum, though images from both projects are included in the catalog's plates and are prominent in the exhibition. In the absence of these essays, the weight of the catalog's discussion tilts toward casting Fenton primarily as an expressive photographer. Conversely, the display of the Crimean and the British Museum photographs in the exhibition, undifferentiated in their presentation from studies of architecture and landscape, equate Fenton's images of soldiers and the museum collection with works of photographic art. While aesthetic issues figure in both bodies of work, they did not motivate their production.