The Valley of the Shadow of Death
1855
Medium
Salted paper print, from the album "Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea" (1856)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 27.2 × 36.4 cm (10 3/4 × 14 3/8 in.); Mount: 42.1 × 52.8 cm (16 5/8 × 20 13/16 in.)
Classification
salted paper print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
123407
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Prominent in photographic circles and favored by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Roger Fenton was commissioned to document the British military during the Crimean War; his pictures there represent one of the first uses of photography in wartime. He spent March through June 1855 with the troops, producing 360 wet-plate glass negatives in his horse-drawn darkroom. The laborious process and lengthy exposure times precluded photographs of battle, yet Fenton captured the psychological intensity of ...
About the Artist
Roger Fenton · 1819–1819
Roger Fenton (1819–1869), born into a prosperous Lancashire merchant family as the son of banker and MP John Fenton, initially pursued a scholarly path, earning a first-class BA from the University of London in 1840 before studying law at University College London. He abandoned these pursuits for art, training as a painter under the history painter Charles Lucy in London by 1847—the two became clo...