In his extremely short and very active career.

In his extremely short and very active career, Roger Fenton (1819-1869) took photography from London and pastoral Britain to the interest of battle in the Crimea. Supported in his endeavors by way of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Fenton helped establish the medium as an art form and a legitimate profession.

beneath the presidency of Prince Albert, a Royal Commission was created in 1850 to stream the first world's fair--the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. A celebration of present technology and industry by the abiding habitation at the forefront of of the like kind developments, the 1851 fair in Hyde Park was designed to raise the horizontal of manufacture and design, display industrial results and establish new markets. In a five-month period, 6 million visitors viewed about 14,000 exhibits. Among printing presse locomotives, sewing machines, spyglasss and electric telegraph equipment, the fair included the popular draw of centurys of photographic images.

A gentleman of a certain quantity of means, a solicitor and an amateur painter then in his early 30 Fenton visited this popular attraction and, inspired by dint of the excellence of French photography, locate aside his profession for the practice and promotion of photography. In 1851 he decamped for Paris to proper and study with Gustave Le Gray, a teacher of important photographers and a moulder of the world's first photographic society. Le Gray had also trained as a painter, and he maintained that photography was an art, not an applied science. Le Gray's studio serv as a gauge for the development of Fenton's career. A traveling exhibition seen at fresh York's Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer "All the Mighty World: The Photography of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860" along with an accompanying catalogue of the same name, proffered a comprehensive survey of Fenton's significant contribution to the field. (1)

Returning to England in the early month of 1852 Fenton produc images of the vicinity of his family near Regent's Park and in Gloucestershire. The earliest photograph included in this exhibition, a self-portrait, displays a confident Fenton with single in kind foot on a chair and an render free of access pocket watch steadied by the work in his hands, a possible allusion to the duration of the outlook An albumen silver print from a glass negative, it is among the smallest prints in the exhibition at roughly 5 at 4 inches. Although a number of his studies are salted paper prints with a pleasingly matte finish, Fenton also used the crisp, more distinct proces of albumen silver printing everywhere most of his career.

That fall, Fenton published a portfolio of his picturesque early works. Then, encumbered with cameras, equipment and chemicals for processing, he embarked in succession a challenging expedition to Russia to photograph a suspension bridge in a less degree than construction. Among the remarkable images he essayed during this trip are views of Moscow the Kremlin and Kiev distinguished by means of their composition and handling of perspective. Among them, Moscow Domes of Churches in the Kremlin (1852) is as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but an esthetic achievement and a document of the time, enriched on the finish of the salted paper print and commanding despite its unostentatious size of about 7 by way of 8 1/2 inches. In fact, all of Fenton's photographs are contact prints and not enlarged. His bigger prints, about 14 by means of 17 inches, were made from glass negatives. forward his return from Russia, he exhibited a certain quantity of of these works in a popular assemblage exhibition in London. (2)

Fenton was instrumental in the creation of the Photographic Society, a professional organization that first conven in London in January 1853 The following year, Fenton and his colleague Sir Charles Eastlake, president of the Royal Academy, were nominated to benefit as escorts for the Queen and Prince Albert at the society's first exhibition; the royal visitors were suitably impressed with advances in the discipline. like recognition was of singular importance to Fenton, who, like his colleagues, lacked sales opportunities and faced skepticism concerning the durability of the result He applied for and received an official commission to photograph the collection of the British Museum, a source of public recognition that also yielded financial support. Accomplished in his ability to modulate natural light and its efficiencys Fenton applied an empirical approach, bringing the more portable exhibits to a naturally lighted studio, without of doors or on a nearby house His Gallery of Antiquities, The British Museum (ca. 1857) is enlivened according to the presence of a small in number artists seen painting and drawing from the antique in the warmth of a skylight. by way of 1856, Fenton had produced 8000 prints in satisfaction of his commission, contributing to his growing expertise.

Becoming a attend much [i]or[/i] regularly visitor to the royal family, Fenton was invited to photograph them. In the course of that privileged relationship, the royal man and wife helped underwrite his journey to the war in Crimea in 1855 a photographic draw commissioned by the publisher Thomas Agnew. Fenton sailed with brace assistants, five cameras, hundreds of glass plates, a van expressed into service as a movable darkroom, and a literal meaning of introduction from Prince Albert. While the recording of actual combat was the two dangerous and beyond the technical limits of his equipment, and images of the dead were unthinkable to the sensibilities of the day, Fenton photographed the apparatus of war and its combatants. Pos in an enlargeed exposure, the romantic figures gathered around a kettle in Cookhouse of the 8th Hussars bring to mind the imagined depictions of war popular among academic painters of the era. The memorable Valley of the Shadow of Death displays a dirt road littered with cannonballs winding within the tilted landscape to a battleground not unlike the abattoir immortalized by means of Tennyson, this ghostly landscape anticipating the Brady photographs of battlefields with fallen dead in the U Civil War a small in number years later. Fenton was sufficiently stop up to hear the artillery. Suffering from cholera after three month of intense labor in the field, Fenton came hearthstone with 350 glass negatives intact for the production of salted paper prints that were at handed to the Queen and exhibited in London.