How Did Roger Fenton Influenced Photography

During the nineteenth century photography was a very popular pursuit. Social and cultural circumstances as well as scientific interests spread the invention and use of photography. Not all people embraced photography, especially some artists who did not consider photographs to be a form of art, but many found it to be a very useful tool. Photographs served as documentation for wars and furthered scientific research, creating new technologies that we take for granted today, making it a useful tool for people of all occupations, quickly spreading all around the world.
This period in time was one dotted with many conflicts and wars. Photographers saw this as a great opportunity to expand their markets. The government used photographs as a form
of propaganda. Politicians, military leaders, soldiers and families of soldiers hired photographers in order to make portraits of them. Along with that, newspaper reporters and magazine journalists took pictures of the war in order to document what was going on. For instance, during the Crimean War the War Department hired two photographers in order to counteract newspaper accounts of the war.
One of those photographers was Roger Fenton. He was a good photographer but faced many challenges such as the hazards of war, the climate, and the lack of proper equipment. The photographs he took has to be sensitized immediately before exposure and developed immediately after. Thus, he had to travel with his own mobile dark room. This made him a great target for attacks, but even then he took over 300 photographs showing scenes of camp life, portraits of commanders and heroes, and panoramas of sights of battles. He also took many stages war images. Although his attempt wasn’t very successful, it was still the first systemic coverage of a conflict (Harding, “Photographing Conflict”). Similarly, during the American Civil War, war correspondents, artists and photographers furnished the public with news and images of the hostility. During smaller conflicts such as the War of the Triple Alliance in South America, many photographers went to the front to take as many photographs as they could. These photographs, such as in the photograph First Battalion April 24 in the Trenches of Tuyuty taken in 1866 (Fig.
1), were very rigid pictures showing troop formations and battle preparations. During the Franco-Prussian War, French officials sent photographically reduced messages between the city and outside the siege line and during the Paris Commune photographs not only were photographs used to record events, but they also served to promote, explain, and rationalize political positions. Thus, the race to record and publish information regarding major events and to promote and justify political reasoning, government, newspaper and magazines helped spread the use of photography.
During this time the culture in Europe encouraged people to try new forms of photography and various movements appeared encouraging new art forms such as naturalistic and impressionistic art. Along with that, innovations such as the first railroads. Photographers such as Alexander Gardner photographed the railroad as it was being constructed. Eventually he compiled these photographs and published in an album titled Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railway, offered for sale on April 1869. One of the photographs in this album was “Westward, the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (Fig. 2), an image of workers laying railroad tracks. Along with photographs of the construction of the railroad Gardner also included images of small town life, settlers’ homes, Native Americans, military installations and of course his main focus, the construction of the railroad (Marien, 132). Thus, along with helping people move from place it place, the railroad also caused an increase in the use of photography.
Lastly, science greatly benefitted from the use of photography as well.
Thanks to photography, scientists could take photographs of microorganisms through the microscope’s lens, permanently preserving their observations through the microscope to share with others. Photomicrography even became a photographic specialty. Similarly, astronomers attempted to take telescopic photographs such as the photograph of the Moon by Lewis Rutherfurd, but the images were not as clear as astronomers wanted them to be and not as popular as photomicrography, but they continued to experiment with the photographs and compete with each other to see who would capture the best ones. The largest international effort in astronomical photography was in 1874 when scientists from Germany, Britain and France entered a friendly competition to record the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun (Tanzi, 3). Photography also led to a great breakthrough in medicine through the creation of the X-ray. In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, a Dutch-German physicist learned that an unknown ray that he labeled the X-ray, could pass through the human body, blackening a photographic plate except where the calcium in the bones absorbed them. His initial scientific paper reporting the phenomenon included an X-ray image of his wife’s hand. The Frau Rontgen’s Hand (1895, Fig. 3) is one of the first images of its kind and took fifteen minutes to create. Although light waves did not create X-rays, the public still
considered it a form of photography, further spreading the use of photography worldwide.
To conclude, photography was very popular during the 19th century and spread due to many social, cultural and scientific changes during this time. The spread of photography resulted in many new jobs and businesses, giving people the chance to document events and results like they never could before. To this day these photographs tell us a lot about the world we live in and how it has progressed to what it is now.