War & Peace

Gathering my thoughts as I trawl through Clarke's  "The Photograph" I am more than slightly concerned that he is missing some history, and I hope, through the unavailability of resource. The essay of Landscape compares, quite rightly the convergence of the painter's traditional view of the landscape which informs the early photographer, such as Fenton. Fenton's view is of a bucolic diorama with as Clarke denotes "no evidence of work in a Fenton photograph." The Fenton viewfinder was ever thus; he attempted to turn the Crimea landscape into a boy's own adventure; admittedly he was constrained by exposure time, but his view of the English landscape seem to me to be entirely informed by his sense of the prevailing social strata he was born into. Fenton carried that same viewfinder to the Crimea and his many staged photographs, admittedly constricted by the length of the exposure, were all imbued with a sense of pre Baden Powell scouting jamboree.Typical of the "first "official" war photographer" - Susan Sontag, Looking at War, The New Yorker December 2, 2002 shows Colonel Hallewell, recumbent on the field with his servant pouring wine for him. No sense of battle fatigue here, no sense of the atrocity of war present under the black cloak of composition. Market forces almost certainly meant that Fenton didn't need to bother with any record of suffering, after all Prince Albert was his patron for his Crimea jaunt.

John Thomson did photograph the London streets in the Dickensian period, but didn't he see the deprivation? There are almost no references to the levels of squalor experienced by the vast majority of its inhabitants - even the socially privileged had to endure the sights and sounds of the guttersnipes.

The Temperance Sweep, John Thomson,1876/7, Bridgeman Education

Thomson has an idealised scene "The Temperance Sweep" of a "reformed chimney sweep" that has a boy looking wistfully away - as if to say "the sweep will continue on the wagon just until I'm needed at the next house to fill my lungs with soot". Thomson may have moved around the city, but his Woodburytypes never really recorded, in much the same way that Fenton never really recorded, life, at least as the masses saw life. Photography in the Victorian English tradition was for the higher social classes, there was no recognition needed to convey this misery to the masses, they couldn't afford it anyway. Dickens may have written Bleak House and his other masterpiece Hard Times, but were there no pictures?

However Thomson never struck lucky in the way that Fenton did. Fenton who never had the ability, even if ever the motivation, to capture the horror of war. Unlike Tolstoy who had witnessed at first hand the battles not that far away in Sebastopol and described them in his "Sketches from Sebastopol" and used them later as source material when he described, in epic detail, the Battles of Austerlitz and Borodino in War and Peace - probably not surpassed in the description of the utter futility and waste of war. Tolstoy, who was on the opposing side as Prince Albert's viewfinder Mr Fenton, would have recognised immediately Fenton's contested masterpiece "The valley of the shadow of death". A haunting image of a gently rolling piece of scrub land littered with cannon balls, some say this was taken twice by Fenton, once prior to the balls being placed there (no doubt by Fenton's servant).

The Valley of Death, after the charge of the Light Brigade, Roger Fenton, 1855, Bridgeman Education

Never mind, it says in that one image more than all the other photographs he took put together and multiplied by the words written by Tolstoy in War and Peace. The cannon balls roll to a mass collection in a ditch and sporadically across the dirt track in the centre of the picture like so many skulls; the track leading out of the image as fast as it can go, by the shortest route and not a speck of redemption in the blank sky. The balls redolent of the skulls in Pol Pots Killing Fields, of the Tutsi massacres and of so many conflicts since and to come.

So an image of real value from the Crimea, yet nothing of our own back yard, it will be left to Mr Gradgrind and his ilk to provide that portrait