Friday 11 November 2005, 13.00–17.00

Roger Fenton, who originally trained as an artist, was the most celebrated and influential English photographer of the mid-Victorian period. His work encompassed virtually every photographic genre: romantic landscapes, intimate portraits of the royal family, stunning architectural views of England’s ruined abbeys and castles, moving reportage of the Crimean War, enchanting orientalist tableaux and lush still lifes.

The morning session takes place at the National Portrait Gallery and the afternoon session is at Tate Britian. The day’s speakers include Heather Birchall, Helen James, Roger Hargreaves, Pam Roberts and Roger Taylor.

Tate Britain  Auditorium
£25 (£20 concessions), booking required

    

Programme

13.10
Registration
Clore Foyer (please use Clore Entrance)

13.30
Pam Roberts: Photography will in time entirely destroy all necessity of men wasting their time in painting still life. Roger Fenton and the still life tradition.
During the mid nineteenth century, there was a huge growth in British still life painting, led by George Lance, William Duffield, William Henry ‘Bird's Nest’ Hunt and Edward Ladell. Their work was much exhibited and Lance and Duffield's paintings were frequently reproduced in The Illustrated London News to which Fenton also contributed images.  Having mastered every possible variation of photography, landscape, war, architecture, portrait and genre, and during the very wet summer of 1860 when landscape work was difficult, Fenton finally turned his attention to photographing still life.  These are amongst the last photographs he took before he abandoned photography in 1862.

14.15
Roger Hargreaves: Fenton and War
Roger Fenton has been rightly acclaimed as one of the authorial pioneers of conflict photography. In the age dominated by the editorial industries of newspaper and magazines in which hero photographers were perceived to be on the frontline dodging bullets and crawling through the mud, his images came to be seen to belong to another era and restrained and limited by the technology available to him at the time. However, more recently, a new generation of war photographer has emerged, typified by Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye who have re-embraced Fenton’s original vision and reinvested it with an almost conceptual modernity.

15.00
Heather Birchall: Fenton: Artist or Photographer?
Judging by the stands at the recent Frieze Art Fair and entries for the Turner Prize, the photographer is today as coveted as the painter or the sculptor. In addition, over the past few years, Tate has collected the work of contemporary photographers including Wolfgang Tillmans and Cindy Sherman, and organised blockbuster exhibitions examining its history. By contrast, during the nineteenth century practitioners of the new medium struggled to gain acceptance, and occasionally made their photographs look like paintings in order to get noticed. This paper discusses Fenton's brief career with the camera in terms of the debate surrounding photography and art, and looks at how far the mechanical instrument could produce images which were not only technically accomplished, but would be recognised as 'Art'. 

15.45
Tea  

16.15
Opportunity to visit the exhibition with all three lecturers.

17.00
End

This event is related to the Roger Fenton exhibition