1468
in Balaclava Harbor in November of 1854. Photographs
from other artists such as Gilbert Elliot, and two military
offi cers, ensigns Brandon and Dawson, were also hired
by the government to cover the war, but all of their works
have since disappeared.
Roger Fenton produced over 350 images of the
Crimean War during 1855. Thomas Agnew hired Fenton
with aspirations of creating a profi table issue of photos
similar to those that the military photographers had been
hired to photograph but never produced. Roger Fenton
wrote in letters of some of the horrors he witnessed
during his time in the Crimean, but his photographs
do not refl ect the scenes he describes. Rather, Fenton
mostly photographed heroic portraits of soldiers, posi-
tive scenes of life in the camps, and images of the sur-
rounding landscape. Fenton may have felt compelled
by Agnew, as well as Queen Victoria with whom the
photographer had developed a warm relationship, to
photograph encouraging images of the war to try and
offset the negative impressions given to the British
people by newspaper reporter William Howard Russell.
Fenton was also limited by photographic materials of
the time which did not yet enable spontaneous action
shots. He was also challenged by the collodion wet plate
process technique which required speed and virtuosity
as he only had short time to develop the plates in his
makeshift traveling laboratory after taking a scene.
Fenton’s most recognized war image is one of the few
in which he allowed a sense of sadness at the destruction
of war to creep into his work. Arriving shortly after the
brutal attack of soldiers of the British Light Brigade
by the Russians on October 25, 1854, Fenton’s “Valley
of the Shadow of Death” showed the infamous valley
as a desolate landscape fi lled with cannon balls. The
exhibition of the photograph in 1855, and the popular-
ity of Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,”
written in 1864, marked this event in the memory of
the British people.
James Robertson, Felice Beato, Charles Langlois,
and Karl Baptist von Szatmari all photographed the
fi nal stages of the Crimean War. Of these, the sixty or so
photographs taken by Robertson have become the most
well known. Robertson’s works showed more scenes
of death, destruction, and violence, the kind of subject
matter not in the work of Fenton. Although Thomas
Agnew & Sons published both Fenton’s and Robertson’s
Crimean photographs in 1856, Robertson does not
seem restricted by Agnew to shoot only government-
favored photos as Fenton had been, perhaps because
of Robertson’s other sources of income. In the end,
Agnew’s commercial adventure was not as successful
as he had hoped. Fenton’s and Robertson’s photographs
went on sale, both individually and as sets, as early as
November 1855. However, the public had little interest
in these images by the end of the war. By the end of
1856, Thomas Agnew & Sons sold all remaining prints
and negatives from both photographers at auctions.
After photographing the end of the Crimean War,
Felice Beato and James Robertson worked together in
Calcutta and photographed the Indian Mutiny, of First
War of Independence, of 1857. Beato’s most striking
images from this period are scenes of the execution
of over 2000 Indian rebels by the British, and those of
Secundra Bagh in which he recorded the devastation in
the months that followed. In his photographs from the
1850s, Beato is often credited as the fi rst to photograph
corpses after a battle. Beato probably choreographed
many of these scenes to heighten the dramatic effect,
perhaps even excavating and arranging corpses. Beato
became the most prolifi c photographer of war scenes of
the Asian world in the nineteenth century including the
recording of the Opium War in China (1860) and the
Japanese attacks in the Simonaki Straights in September
of 1864. Also during this decade, several photographers
were sent to the battlefi elds during the War of the Triple
Alliance in South America (1864–1870), in hopes for
commercial success. Bate & Co. published Esteban
García’s work from this period in sets of ten titled La
Guerra Ilustrada. However, it was the American Civil
War (1861–1865) that was the fi rst war to be extensively
photographed.1860s/American Civil War
It was the publishers’ awareness of the public’s desire
for war scenes that caused the prolifi c photographic
work produced during The American Civil War; at least
fi ve hindred photographers accompanied the soldiers of
the North. Photographs were then made into engrav-
ings to be published in the papers, or sold to E. and H.
T. Anthony and Co., who at times issued more than a
thousand pictures a day. The photographs themselves
would not be viewed by the public until they were dis-
played in galleries.
George S. Cook took images right after the fall of
Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the war between
North and South. While Cook became one of the few
photographers to shoot Confederate subjects, one of his
most famous works is of a Federal troop leader, Major
Robert Anderson who had been defeated at Fort Sumter.
After the war, Cook collected over 10,000 photographs
from the war; these are now in the collection of the
Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia.
However, Matthew B. Brady is the name most syn-
onymous with Civil War photography. He determined
that he could make a profi t organizing photographers to
shoot the war and closed most of his galleries which had
been highly successful portrait studios for the rich and
famous. He had even done several sittings with President
Lincoln who credited Brady with helping him win the