The Crimean War
The first major conflict to ever be photographed
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1855
In the 1850s, the Crimean War emerged from a dispute over the rights of Christian minorities in the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land. Tensions among Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire eventually boiled over into a war centered in the Balkans and the critical warm-water ports of the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea.The fighting in Crimea, which included the famed “Charge of the Light Brigade,” eventually settled into a prolonged stalemate, with allied British, French and Ottomans besieging the Russian-held port of Sevastopol. Supply interruptions, strategic errors and a devastating winter made conditions miserable and deadly for the Allies encircling the city.With public opinion shifting against a mismanaged war with few clear objectives, the British government hired photographer Roger Fenton to travel to Crimea and create some of the first war photographs in history. He arrived in March 1855 and stayed for 3.5 months.Fenton’s employers wished to convey a sense of steadfastness and success in the military campaign. As such, Fenton made no records of soldiers killed by the winter cold or cholera, or who were maimed by artillery fire. With large, heavy cameras requiring long exposures of static subjects, Fenton photographed soldiers, laborers and generals, and recorded the orderly rows of tents and supply trains stretching across the landscape from the port of Balaklava to the front.
...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
Fenton’s most famous — and controversial — photograph was an image captured on April 23, 1855. It depicted a shallow valley on the road to Sevastopol strewn with cannonballs, dubbed by soldiers “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” for the frequency with which it was shelled by the Russians. In the famous image, cannonballs accumulated in ditches on the side of the road. But Fenton also took another, lesser seen image of the same scene, with no cannonballs on top of the road. Historians have offered many competing theories about which photograph was taken first, and why and by whom the cannonballs were moved. An exhaustive investigation by filmmaker Errol Morris concluded, based on the downhill sliding of several small rocks between the two frames, that the image with cannonballs off the road came first, and that the cannonballs were then moved onto the road for the second photo.Whether Fenton moved them there to create additional drama or compositional harmony, or whether they were tossed there by soldiers looking to salvage them, the apparent staging of the image (and Fenton’s assignment) is a reminder of the hazards of treating photographs as objective evidence, even 133 years before the invention of Photoshop.
