Roger Fenton at the National Gallery

From my Bloomberg review of Roger Fenton at the National Gallery (catalogue here):

In the photograph, the soldier stands just off center, a compositional trick that deprives him of any heroic glory. (Heroes fill the center of photographs, bit players are pushed to the sides.) The man's weight mostly rests on one leg in what's often a swaggering cowboy pose.

That's not how it feels here: The soldier's shoulders are slouched and his arms seem to be pulled toward by the floor. He just looks tired. His beard is mangy and his coat is dirty. And if by now you didn't know that this man was barely holding it together, there's his stare. His pale eyes are as alive as
marbles.

"Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards'' could be any war photograph of the past 150 years, yet it's one of the first. Taken by Roger Fenton (1819-1869), it portrays a British captain in the Crimean War in 1855. It's one of eight of Fenton's landmark Crimean War photographs in the retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. until Jan. 2, 2005.

"All the Mighty World,'' the first exhibit installed in the NGA's new photography galleries, is rich with landmark images and is expertly presented. The show's catalogue ($65), jointly published by the NGA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, will interest both photography buffs and lovers of British history. My only quibble with the show is how few of the Crimean photos are here. Fenton took about 350 photos of the Crimean. Why aren't more included?

Scholars aren't sure what prompted Fenton's journey. The funder of the trip was a print-seller named Thomas Agnew, who was upset at the way the liberal press portrayed the war in Crimea as an inhumane mess, a Victorian-era quagmire.

Combine Agnew's interest with the government approval of Fenton's trip -- he traveled to Crimea with letters of introduction from Prince Albert, and his passage to Crimea was provided by a group that included Britain's secretary of state for war -- and it seems likely that Fenton went to the Crimea to glorify the British Empire, rather than to question it. You might say he was an early imbedded.

Given this, Fenton certainly wasn't going to shoot anything resembling a gruesome post-battle scene. But the struggle of the everyman soldier, in no matter how unjust a war, is always heroic. So while the hard stares and the exhausted posture of the soldiers he shot suck the triumphalism right out of his subjects, portraits were still a primary output. Fenton was quick to realize that even if a national army was getting clobbered, individual valor was always admirable.

Fenton's most remarkable photograph, and a candidate for Finest Photograph Ever Taken, is one that oozes slaughter. It shows a Crimean ravine that was bombarded so often by the Russians that British troops gave it the stately but grim name that the photograph borrows: "Valley of the Shadow of Death.''

In this picture, the shelling is over. The bottom two-thirds of Fenton's frame is filled with a rocky, rolling landscape, the top third is a flat, cloudy sky. A road runs from the lower right-hand corner to the middle of the picture, pulling your eye into the image. The hills are rocky, the road and a gutter are filled with scores of smooth, round cannonballs, each one bigger than your fist. There is no evident gore or carnage, yet the viewer knows that before cannonballs get to the ground, they flew through the air.

Fenton spent only a short eight years behind the lens, giving it up in 1860 after the crushing death of his son. Yet how prolific he had been. On view are photographs of the royal family, both formally and at play, and riveting documents of the Industrial Revolution-era emerging in London. ("Westminster from Waterloo Bridge," circa 1858, shows the Houses of Parliament under construction, presaging Monet's hazier impressionist takes on the same scene.) We see British tourist sites and the homes and leisure activities of the aristocracy who bought his work. His contributions to the emerging art of photography included helping to found what became the Royal Photographic Society.

It's the war pictures that linger in the mind. Last week, I was reminded of just how immediate those Crimean photos are. On Nov. 10, most major newspapers in America featured the same front-page photo of a marine who had fought in the battle for Falluja. The soldier's face filled most of the picture. His helmet was frayed, his semi-shaven face was streaked with camouflage paint and a cut between his eyes trickled blood down the length of his nose. A cigarette dangled from his mouth.

Like Fenton's pictures,  this image could almost be taken for noble heroism. But as with the portrait of Captain Lord Balgonie, the soldier's eyes told a different story. The marine was locked into a sixty-yard squint.

The New York Post ran the photo with the headline, "Marlboro men kick butt in Fallujah." One hundred and fifty years after the first war photographs were taken, we read them the same way.

Related: Choire Sicha led me to water, the LAT on Luis Sinco's photograph, Library of Congress on Fenton.