526
group remains persuasive, although just when he joined
is unclear. His name was included in a list of six Pho-
tographic Club members in 1852 who approached Wil-
liam Henry Fox Talbot in an attempt to persuade him to
waive licence fees for the calotype process. However, as
Talbot at that time claimed patent jurisdiction over both
the waxed paper and wet collodion processes, Fenton’s
membership as late as 1852 did not in itself establish him
as a user of the calotype, by which time his enthusiasm
for waxed paper was well documented.
In that same year the ‘Organising Committee’ or
‘Provisional Committee’ which steered the establish-
ment of the Photographic Society of London (later The
Royal Photographic Society) comprised the same six
men—Fenton, Peter le Neve Foster, Sir William Newton,
Peter Fry, Robert Hunt and Frederick Berger.
On a visit to Paris in October 1851, Fenton met
Gustave le Gray, inventor of the waxed paper process,
and two other accomplished photographers—Vicomte
Joseph Vigier and Monsieur Pulch, both of whom pub-
lished and used variants of le Gray’s method. By April
of the following year he was successfully exploiting
the process in his photography in Gloucestershire,
and by August had overseen the publication of his
treatise “Photography on Waxed Paper” published in
the fi fth edition of W. H. Thornthwaite’s A Guide to
Photography, London, 1852. In that text he refers to
Pulch’s process as one he has used with considerable
success.
Declining to recommend le Gray’s formulation on
account of the perceived weakness of its solutions,
he detailed both Vigier’s and Pulch’s variants. In ad-
dition, he drew attention to the French preference for
English papers—especially the thin paper produced
by Whatman & Co—and the British preference for
French papers, especially those produced by Lacroix
and Canson.
In the following months, Fenton was in Russia, using
waxed paper to photograph work on Charles Vignoles’
bridge over the River Dneiper at Kiev, making a series
of stereoscopic views intended for viewing through
Charles Wheatstone’s Refl ecting Stereoscope.
Authorship of a treatise on a relatively new process,
and the production of a series of accomplished images
both in England and in Russia both point to Fenton’s
initial engagement with photography having taken place
well before the spring of 1852. The absence of any im-
ages from before that time, however, is curious.
The preparation for, and the journey to Russia in
the autumn of 1852 was almost certainly Fenton’s fi rst
involvement with stereoscopy, but as an amateur photo-
grapher. The professional photographer in the team was
J. C. Bourne, and Fenton’s work for his friend Vignoles
in Kiev can be assumed to have been quite separate from
Bourne’s professional assignment.
Fenton prefaced the journey with some experimental
photography at Regent’s Park Zoo, evaluating meth-
ods of producing effective stereoscopic imagery. His
subjects included a dead stag which was photographed
using a series of different approaches to produce the
optimum stereoscopic effect. Three surviving pairs of
images from large format waxed paper negatives attest
to these experiments, and the separations range from less
than a metre to several metres. In the subsequent stere-
oscopic pairs produced in Russia, the distance between
the two taking positions appears to be in the region of
one to two metres, resulting in images which create a
slightly exaggerated stereo effect when viewed in the
Refl ecting Stereoscope. On location in Kiev and Mos-
cow, Fenton’s experimentation provided the foundations
for some remarkable stereoscopic views of Vignoles’
bridge construction site in Kiev, and of the buildings in
the Kremlin, Moscow.
The Russian images mark a signifi cant change in
Fenton’s photography, and the journey produced the fi rst
images which signifi cantly contributed to his enduring
reputation as a major image-maker. One photograph,
Domes of the Cathedral of the Resurrection, Kremlin,
is now considered by historians and collectors to be
an icon of early photography. Intriguingly, it does not
appear in the list of photographs by Fenton exhibited
at the exhibition in December 1852. Yet, included were
images such as Pittevilla Spa, Cheltenham and The Old
We l l Wa l k which had been less than well received when
fi rst published in The Photographic Album earlier that
year.
Fenton’s enthusiasm for establishing a British pho-
tographic organisation in London predates his earliest
dated images by some months—again attesting to an
already established enthusiasm for photography.
The Societé heliographique, the world’s fi rst (but
short-lived) photographic society, was established in
Paris in January 1851 with Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis
Gros as President, and in October 1851, Fenton travelled
to France to meet the society’s founders, and learn of
their aims and objectives. His paper ‘Proposal for the
formation of a Photographic Society’ appeared in The
Chemist magazine in March 1852, and was an abridged
version of a much longer paper which recent research
has attributed to Antoine Claudet. Fenton and Claudet
were both ardent advocates of a forum in which photog-
raphers could discuss and progress their art, so a degree
of collaboration in the development of such a proposal is
not surprising. By June 1852, an Organising Committee,
formed to promote the establishment of the new society,
had elected Fenton as its Honorary Secretary, and it is
clear that many of the fundamental principles which
guided their efforts originated with Fenton—particularly
the establishment of a regular journal which would dis-
seminate papers on new development in photography,