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

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.

The catalog essays on Fenton's artistic subjects contextualize his photographs in relation to the works of other photographers, along with contemporary prints, watercolors and paintings. Malcolm Daniel's essay. "On Nature's Invitation Do I Come: Roger Fenton's Landscapes," concentrates on the six major bodies of work Fenton made in England, Scotland and Wales between 1852 and 1860. Daniel discusses Fenton's early photography in Russia and images taken in and around London, many of which were intended for viewing in a Wheat-stone reflecting stereograph, a format Fenton then abandoned to make large photographs designed for exhibition alongside prints, watercolors and paintings. Fenton's selection of subjects and points of view in his landscapes was deeply informed by picturesque aesthetics; other scenes, often familiar from personal experience, are informed by romanticism. Daniel reviews Fenton's work in relation to images in guidebooks, prints and paintings, evaluating the photographer's innovative use of light and his search for new views and technical effects in competition with such peers as Francis Bedford and Le Gray.

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Gordon Baldwin's essay, "In Pursuit of Architecture," on Fenton's photography of architecture (the largest class of subject in his work, save his photography at the British Museum) thoroughly examines his working method for photographing buildings and evaluates Fenton's indebtedness to existing visual prototypes in his selection of sites and point of view. Baldwin's close analysis explains how Fenton's strategies of camera position, lighting and framing yielded sophisticated and distinctive photographs of works of architecture familiar from engravings and lithographs. Roger Taylor's essay on Fenton's association with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, "Mr. Fenton Explained Everything: Queen Victoria and Roger Fenton," patrons of the Photographic Society, carefully considers Fenton's portraits of the Royal Family in relation to protocols for their visual representation and contextual information on their private and public activities. The portraits that Fenton took in 1854 are among the earliest photographs of the Royal Family and include a strikingly informal portrait of the Queen surrounded by her children, as well as images that represent the Queen's developing recognition of the value of photography for crafting an image for the public.

Baldwin discusses a suite of some 50 Orientalist studies that Fenton made in 1858 in "Trying His Hand upon Some Oriental Figure Subjects." These photographs are a case of Fenton adapting subject matter from painting into photography, but Baldwin also connects the escapist associations of Orientalist imagery with the make-believe of tableaux vivant photography. Although Fenton himself appears in only two images, the other figures in his photographs include friends and associates who had either traveled to the Middle East or had an interest in the region. A professional female model, exhibiting gestures and dress inappropriate for a woman of Fenton's class, posed alone and with the men, adding the erotic dimension central to Orientalist fantasies. Pam Roberts examines Fenton's foray into the genre of still-life imagery in her essay "Roger Fenton and the Still-Life Tradition." She measures the photographic qualities of Fenton's lush still lives against the visual culture in which Fenton worked. Her adroit review of the factors influencing Fenton's still lives includes his production of a well-regarded copy photograph of a painting by the influential still-life painter George Lance and Fenton's experimentation with the genre of images published in the Stereoscopic Magazine, a short-lived periodical that featured stereograph cards with articles. However, in this, as his other subjects, critics recognized his accomplishment, but the work did not find a market.

Other essays by Roberts and Taylor evaluate Fenton's photographic authorship within the social and professional frameworks for the practice of photography in England during the period. In "The Exertions of Mr. Fenton: Roger Fenton and the Founding of the Photographic Society," Roberts gives a clear account of Fenton's decisive role in the formation of the Photographic Society, including thorny negotiations with William Henry Fox Talbot over his patent claims on the negative-positive process, and Fenton's influential leadership of the organization through the 1850s. Based upon his invaluable compilation of data from Victorian exhibitions of photographs held between 1839 and 1865, Taylor analyzes the singular scale and wide geographic range of Fenton's efforts to make his work known to the public in the essay "A Most Enthusiastic Cultivator of His Art: Fenton's Critics and the Trajectory of His Career." Fenton also either initiated or participated in exhibitions and publications designed to attract print collectors to photography, including partnership in a company, the Patent Photo-Galvanographic Company, which made photomechanical copies of his images.

Taylor's analyzes the developing tensions in the Photographic Society between upper class gentlemen, for whom photography was an avocation, and photographers who worked in trade. Fenton was a gentleman who, like a painter, was interested in selling his artistic work. By the late 1850s the split between professional and amateur photographers in the Society became more pronounced, as the practice of photography became increasingly commercialized. With exhibitions effectively transformed into displays for professional photographers, Fenton lost an artistic framework for his images and this, combined with the commercialization of the Photographic Society, led to his retirement from photography.

In his essay "Roger Fenton: The Artist's Eye," Richard Pare discusses a number of Fenton's diverse projects, including images from the Crimea, as explorations of the medium. While acknowledging features of Fenton's contemporary artistic discourse, Pare's essay discusses Fenton's work in formalist terms. The catalog also includes an extensive, well-annotated chronology of Fenton's life and career by Taylor and Baldwin.

Roger Fenton deserves a monographic study. He was a singularly productive and accomplished photographer, whose images regularly earned high praise and whose leadership of the Photographic Society furthered important research and discussion of the medium. Yet the twenty-first-century artistic renown of Fenton's photographs contrasts with the relative obscurity of many of the artists, such as George Lance, Benjamin Winkles, Charles Lucy and Frank Dillon, whose works informed Fenton's imagery. Fenton's photographic art was addressed to an audience of his affluent peers: was Fenton the artistic photographer so different from many of his fellow painters in his willingness to produce undemanding subjects with a ready appeal for the thriving mid-Victorian art market? Fenton's ongoing interest in the reproduction of his prints in multiples and the publication of his stereographs as illustrations to texts attests to his interest in shaping the social significance of photography as a reproductive medium, even as the commercial failures of these projects also attest to the limitations of Fenton's understanding of the market. The exclusion of this Fenton imagery from the National Gallery installation was a missed opportunity to contextualize Fenton's activities within a broader English visual culture. Fenton recognized photography as a medium that could reinforce the worldview of his social class with the promise of a new technology.

JOANNE LUKITSH teaches modern art and the history of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.