Cossack Bay, Balaklava
1855
Medium
Salted paper print, from the album "Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea" (1856)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 28.2 × 36 cm (11 1/8 × 14 3/16 in.); Mount: 41.2 × 52.7 cm (16 1/4 × 20 3/4 in.)
Classification
salted paper print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
123393
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Socially well connected and prominent in photographic circles, Roger Fenton was commissioned to document the British military during the Crimean War. He spent March through June 1855 with the troops, producing 350 wet-plate glass negatives in his horse-drawn darkroom; they were later shown in exhibitions and published in portfolios for purchase. Because of technical limitations and his presumed upper-end clientele, these earliest images of war do not depict death and battle, but rather portraits...
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...