Tate Britain| Past Exhibitions

Roger Fenton was the most celebrated photographer in England during the 1850s. In a single decade, he excelled in every area of photography. He produced images of England’s stately homes and ruined abbeys, atmospheric countryside views, reportage of the Crimean War, portraits of Queen Victoria and her family, Orientalist studies, and still lifes.

Born in 1819 near Rochdale in Lancashire, Fenton moved to London at the age of nineteen to study law. But during the 1840s he changed direction, and decided to study painting.

Like many British artists, Fenton decided to take up photography after seeing examples of the new art form at the Great Exhibition in 1851. He trained in Paris with a leading photographer, and was making his first successful photographs by February 1852.

Fenton was a passionate advocate for photography throughout his short career. He founded what became the Royal Photographic Society, organised public exhibitions and pushed for copyright protection for photographs. He proved that photography was a worthy rival to the traditional arts of drawing and painting.

Early Works

Fenton began his career early in 1852, taking photographs of himself and of the area around his home near Regent’s Park.

But Fenton made his first real body of successful work in Russia in that autumn. He was invited by his friend, the engineer Charles Blacker Vignoles, to photograph a suspension bridge that Vignoles was building for Czar Nicholas I across the Dnieper River near Kief.

Although as yet an inexperienced photographer, Fenton saw no reason to limit himself to his appointed task. He returned to London in late November with a portfolio filled with photos of the landmarks of Kief, St Petersburg and Moscow. When exhibited in 1853, they were the first photos of Russia seen by the British public.

After his return home, Fenton turned his camera toward quintessentially English subjects: the rivers, pathways, and ancient forests of Yorkshire, and the ruins of its medieval abbeys.

The Crimean War

In 1854, long-standing tensions over Russian expansion in Europe erupted into war. England and France allied with the Ottoman Turks, and attacked Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula (part of modern-day Ukraine).

The Manchester publisher, Thomas Agnew, commissioned Fenton to document the conflict. He left in February 1855, with two assistants, a letter of introduction from Prince Albert, five cameras, seven hundred glass plates and a wine merchant’s van refitted as a travelling darkroom.

Fenton was the first to use photography to document war. He didn’t focus on the fighting: images of the dead and wounded would have offended his intended customers. Instead he photographed the port of Balaklava, the camps and officers of the British and French armies, and the Zouaves, Turks, and Croats.

He brought back over 350 negatives. When he exhibited prints in London in early September, news arrived that the Russians had retreated and Sevastopol had fallen.

Transcripts of letters

Faithful transcripts of letters sent by Roger Fenton to family and friends during his "Photographic Trip to the Crimea" in 1855 are available here www.rogerfenton.org.uk

The venture is a collaborative project initiated by De Montfort University, using the two surviving letter books in the collections of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. This is the first occasion that all twenty five letters have been published in full.

Scotland and Wales

Fenton returned to architecture and landscape in the autumn of 1856. He travelled to the Scottish highlands to photograph the royal family at their new castle at Balmoral. On the way he resumed his exploration of light and atmosphere by photographing monuments such as Roslin Chapel and the abbeys of Lindisfarne and Melrose.

In the following year, Fenton made his home base in Bettws-y-Coed, a village in north Wales popular with hikers and fishermen as well as sketchers and painters. Guidebooks described nearby sites along the Conwy and other rivers as among the most sublime and picturesque in the British Isles. Fenton made many of his most compelling photos here. 'No one can touch Fenton in landscape', wrote the Journal of the Photographic Society. 'There is such an artistic feeling about the whole of these pictures.’

The British Museum

In 1853, Fenton was hired as 'Photographer to the British Museum' - the first official photographer at any museum. He forged a new role for photography, creating images that would help the museum catalogue, classify, and publicise its growing collection.

Fenton provided a precise list of the cameras, lenses, and darkroom equipment he would need, as well as extensive instructions for building a glassed-in studio on the museum’s roof. He began work in February 1854.

One of his greatest challenges was to illuminate the objects without artificial light. Portable works of art were brought to the roof-top studio, where a system of blinds could adjust the direction and intensity of the light. Some objects were even taken outdoors to be photographed in direct sunlight, to the dismay of one curator. With assistants, Fenton produced more than eight thousand prints for the museum by 1856.

Sacred and Secular Architecture

Fenton was England’s most impressive photographer of architecture. Almost every year from 1852 to 1860, Fenton set out on a photographic campaign in late summer or early autumn, in an effort to photograph all of Britain’s major cathedrals and abbeys, castles and stately homes.

Fenton managed to combine perfect technique with an unerring ability to choose the best vantage point and lighting conditions. This enabled him to capture the smallest details of architecture, while at the same time conveying a sense of monumentality.

Usually, Fenton took a series of pictures of each building. He often began with a distant view which included the natural setting and then moved closer to show its overall shape and main features. Finally, he would select individual details for still closer portrayal - a particular chapel, porch, or portal - sometimes including figures to give a sense of scale and to animate the scene.

Orientalist Studies

In January 1859, Fenton’s exhibits at the sixth annual exhibition of the Photographic Society included seven with ‘Orientalist’ themes: men in robes and turbans sitting cross-legged on Turkish rugs, pouring coffee, smoking water pipes, or playing exotic instruments. But Fenton had not made these images in what Victorians thought of as ‘the Orient’: the Middle East or North Africa. They were not ethnographic studies but costume dramas, enacted the previous summer in Fenton’s London studio.

Fenton made about fifty such pictures, evoking a fantasy of sensuality and exotic ritual. They appealed to a wider Victorian enthusiasm for escapism through dressing in costume and staging tableaux.

But they were also part of Fenton’s passionate desire to elevate the status of photography. By tackling themes which echoed paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Fenton hoped to show photography as the equal of painting.

Landscape and Stately Homes

Fenton began recording country houses in 1858. He delighted in distant views, showing impressive architectural structures in their landscape settings.

He had unusually wide access to Harewood House in Yorkshire, where his brother-in-law was the estate manager. Here he recorded not only the house, but also its owners, the Lascelles. His photos of the billiard room at Mentmore, the great Rothschild house in Buckinghamshire, are rare records of people at leisure at home during the period.

In 1859 he turned to landscape again, this time his native Lancashire, where Fenton and his relatives owned land and property. He spent some time photographing Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school set in wooded parkland and grounds including farms and some of the best fishing in the area.

In the following year spent he photographed Windsor Castle, as well as touring the Lake District. The photographs he took there that summer were his final landscapes.

Final Years

In the summer of 1860 Fenton photographed over forty large, luxuriant still lifes, once again showing that photography could equal - or surpass - the traditional roles of painting. These images also seem tinged with sadness over the achingly brief beauty of life. Fenton’s only son had died in April 1860, aged fifteen months.

Marcus Sparling, Fenton’s longtime assistant, died the same month. The family mill that had helped to support Fenton’s comfortable lifestyle also closed later that year. Photography itself was at a tipping point. Hundreds of thousands of small, cheap photographs flooded the market. Fenton, like many others, found he could not compete with the photographic industry and still uphold his high professional standards.

In 1862 Fenton resigned from the Royal Photographic Society. He sold his equipment and negatives, and returned to the practice of law. But in a single decade he had played a pivotal role in advancing photography as a medium of visual delight and powerful expression.

Exhibition Introduction