their clothes. Lady Eastlake seems to have written from personal experience in 1857:
Every sanguine little couple who set up a glass-house at the commencement of summer, call their friends about them, and toil alternately in broiling light and stifling gloom, have said before long, in their hearts, “Photography, thy name is disappointment!” But the photographic back is fitted to the burden.
Yet, when a less messy process was invented, many looked back on the good old days. They missed the intimate sense of material and the craftsmanship of the obsolete process. As late as 1906 R. Child Bayley wrote:
The very smell of the ether has a fascination. The wet plate photographer cleans his glass and dirts his fingers, coats his plate, sensitizes it, develops it and dries or smashes it as he may think fit, and all within an hour. . . . There is no such feeling of “alone I did it” to be obtained by the user of the dry plate of commerce.
Lewis Carroll would have nothing to do with the new process. He considered it unfit for “artistic effect,” and sent his negative to be printed by H. P. Robinson.
vacquerie: Victor Hugo's hand, 1852. Eastman Historical Photographic Collection, Rochester, N.Y.
6 THE FAITHFUL WITNESS
In the winter of 1855 Roger Fenton sailed from England on the ship Hecla for the theatre of the Crimean War as an accredited war photographer. He was backed by Agnew Brothers, picture dealers of Manchester, who knew his accomplished architectural, landscape and portrait photographs. He had studied painting with Paul Delaroche, and as the first secretary of the Photographic Society he was a friend of Rejlander, Robinson and the other artistphotographers.
Documentation of battle was a new application of photography. Daguerreotypes had been taken during the Mexican War showing officers and men, but there is no evidence that they were taken during combat. Fenton was the first to photograph under fire and to show the very battlefields.
He took with him a wagon, fitted out as a darkroom, for he was using the wet collodion process. Five cameras, seven hundred glass plates, chemicals, rations, harnesses and tools made up his equipment. At Gibraltar he bought four horses.
The ‘ Photographic Van” was unloaded at Balaklava in March. 1855. In a month he was at the front. Once a piece of the van roof was torn off by enemy shell lire, but he was more bothered by demands to take portraits. “If I refuse to take them. I get no facilities for conveying my van from one locality to another,” he complained. The heat was excessive. “When my van door is closed before the plate is prepared, perspiration is running down my face, and dropping like tears. . . . The developing water is so hot I can hardly bear my hands in it.” He returned from the Crimea in July with over three hundred negatives. Exhibitions were held in London and in Paris: wood engravings of the more interesting scenes were printed in the Illustrated Loudon News. The subjects were landscapes and portraits — battlefields and fortifications, officers and men. There were no scenes of action: to record them was then beyond the power of the camera. “ The photographer who follows in the wake of modern armies must be content with conditions of repose and with the still life which remains when the fighting is oxer,” the London Times wrote of Fenton’s work. To a public used to the conventional fantasies of romantic
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| fenton: Crimean War: Camp of the 5th Dragoon Guards, looking north towards Kadikoi. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. |
battle painters, these photographs seemed dull, yet they recognized in them the virtue of the camera as a faithful witness. “Whatever he represents from the field must be real,” the Times admitted, “and the private soldier has just as good a likeness as the general.”
War has ever been an ungrateful subject for the photographer. The battlefields of the Crimea appear deserted; officers and men stand in bored groups. Even those scenes taken under direct shellfire show nothing of the menace which the photographer felt. But to the soldiers in their unshapely battledress and to the generals in their smart uniforms, these photographs must have carried an authentic stamp which no other kind of picture could convey.
When war broke out in America between the States in 1861, the photographic fraternity took the news lightly. “A battle scene is a fine subject for an
artist — painter, historian or photographer," declared the editor of the American Journal of Photography. “We hope to see a photograph of the next battle. . . . There will be little danger in the active duties, for the photographer must be beyond the smell of gunpowder or his chemicals will not work."
How greatly the dangers and difficulties of combat photography had been underestimated was soon found out by Brady, the former daguerreotypist. He already had shown his interest in history in the publication of his Gallery of Illustrious Americans. This sense of photographic documentation impelled him to undertake the recording of the Civil War; his close friendship with influential government leaders enabled him to secure the necessary authorization to wander where he chose; and from his assistant Alexander Gardner he had acquired technical skill in using wet plates.
He hurried to the front with his assistants, where his photographic buggy became a familiar sight to the soldiers, who called it the “What-is-it?” wagon, and spoke of Brady as “That grand picture maker.” It must have required no little zeal and intrepidity to remain crouched for minutes on end in the darkness of that fragile darkroom, going through the delicate manipulations of preparing and processing the glass plates while the din of battle shook the ground. Unarmed, knowing that the wagon itself was a suspicious-looking target, the photographers were exposed to the hazards of war. They risked their lives to save their plates. Brady was almost killed at Bull Run. Lost for three days, he finally turned up in Washington, haggard and hungry, still in his long linen duster, from which protruded a sword given him by a Zouave. He purchased new equipment, rounded up his assistants, and rushed back to the battlefields.
Brady and his men photographed every phase of the war which their technique could encompass: battlefields, ruins, officers, men, artillery, corpses, ships, railroads. He ordered two negatives of the same subject made whenever possible. There were seven thousand when peace was declared. “The views,” said his catalog, "were taken on the spot, during the progress of hostilities, and represent ‘grim-visaged war’ exactly as it appeared.”
His expenses, even more numerous, put him in debt, and he lost control of the negatives. One set was purchased by the War Department on payment of the storage bilclass="underline" these are now preserved in the National Archives. Another set was seized, in default of payment, by E. and H. T. Anthony and Company, the stockhouse which had supplied him with materiaclass="underline" these negatives are now in the Library of Congress.
Brady himself appears to have been the first to photograph the Civil War,
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| brady: City Point, Richmond, Va., 1865. The National Archives, Washington. D.C. |
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| brady: The ruins of Richmond, Va., about 1865. The Museum of Modern Art |
for the editor of Humphrey’s Journal of Photography remarked in the issue of September 15, 1861, that Brady was planning to return to the front and was amazed that other photographers had not followed his example.