Art Institute of Chicago

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Roger Fenton

Date

1855

Medium

Salted paper print, from the album "Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea" (1856)

Culture

England

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Prominent in photographic circles and favored by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Roger Fenton was commissioned to document the British military during the Crimean War; his pictures there represent one of the first uses of photography in wartime. He spent March through June 1855 with the troops, producing 360 wet-plate glass negatives in his horse-drawn darkroom. The laborious process and lengthy exposure times precluded photographs of battle, yet Fenton captured the psychological intensity of war in pictures such as The Valley of the Shadow of Death . A superficial sense of barren calm is belied by the numerous Russian cannonballs, which cover the ground to indicate past violence and suggest imminent future danger in the area. Fenton exhibited this and related images in London in the fall of 1855, provoking enormous public interest, and he published them in portfolio editions.

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