All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

Baldwin, Gordon, Malcolm Daniel, and Sarah Greenough, with contributions by Richard Pare, Pam Roberts, and Roger Taylor (2004)

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Description

Roger Fenton (1819–1869) was England's most celebrated photographer during the 1850s, the young medium's most glorious moment. After studying law and painting, Fenton took up the camera in 1851 and immediately began to produce highly original images. During a decade of work he mastered every photographic genre he attempted: architectural photography, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant.

Fenton pictured noble country houses, evocative ruins, and the rolling countryside that surrounded them—majestic summations of rural England. Equally arresting are his muscular views of cathedrals and of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain's power. Possessing flawless technique and an artist's instinct for composition and light, he made photographs that combine the clarity of a newly modern world with the poetry of a Romantic sensibility. Fenton's most compelling landscape works—intense meditations infused with a reverence for nature—call to mind cloud studies by Constable or Turner's explorations of light and atmosphere.

Fenton's grasp was wide-ranging. He traveled to Russia in 1852 and was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev. Commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War—which pitted European nations against an expansionist Russia—he returned with portraits of shell-shocked soldiers and confident officers, views of a chaotic Balaklava harbor, and bleak panoramas of the terrain of battle.

Sharing the mid-nineteenth-century passion for all things exotic, Fenton produced a series of Orientalist posed costume pictures in which he strove for the theatrical effects of Delacroix and Ingres. A final, remarkable series of lush still lifes triumphantly achieves the same goal that Fenton had sought from the beginning: to demonstrate that photography could equal painting and even surpass it.

An active proponent of photography, Fenton was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which encouraged the advancement of the medium and the exhibition of members' works throughout Britain. But in 1862, for reasons both personal and professional, he sold his equipment and negatives, resigned from society, and returned to the practice of law. In a career of a single decade, Fenton had done much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight.

This volume presents ninety of Fenton's finest photographs, exactingly reproduced. Six leading scholars have contributed nine illustrated essays that address every aspect of Fenton's career, as well as a comprehensive, documented chronology.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
A Note on Early Photographic Techniques
Map of the British Isles, with major sites photographed by Fenton

"A New Starting Point": Roger Fenton's Life
Sarah Greenough

"On Natures Invitation Do I Come": Roger Fenton's Landscapes
Malcolm Daniel

In Pursuit of Architecture
Gordon Baldwin

"Mr. Fenton Explained Everything": Queen Victoria and Roger Fenton
Roger Taylor

"Trying His Hand upon Some Oriental Figure Subjects"
Gordon Baldwin

Roger Fenton and the Still-Life Tradition
Pam Roberts

Plates

"A Most Enthusiastic Cultivator of His Art": Fenton's Critics and the Trajectory of His Career
Roger Taylor

"The Exertions of Mr. Fenton": Roger Fenton and the Founding of the Photographic Society
Pam Roberts

Roger Fenton: The Artist's Eye
Richard Pare

A Chronology of the Life and Photographic Career of Roger Fenton
Roger Taylor and Gordon Baldwin

List of Plates
Notes to the Essays and Chronology
Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

About the authors

Gordon Baldwin is Associate Curator of Photographs, The J. Paul Getty Museum.

Malcolm Daniel is Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sarah Greenough is Curator and Head of the Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art.

Press reviews

History of Photography

"... filled with facts, insights, and informed speculation ... offers extensive research, scholarship and reproductions of the highest quality ... it is indisputably an excellent resource to be valued and enjoyed by both subject specialists and those with a general interest in the history of photography."

Choice Reviews Online

"... handsome ... Highly recommended."

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Gordon Baldwin

Malcolm R. Daniel

Sarah Greenough

Richard Pare

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (4)

Essays (3)

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Roger Fenton (1819–1869)

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Timelines (1)

Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.

Exhibition

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

Roger Fenton (1819–1869) was the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the golden age of the medium in the 1850s. This major loan exhibition unites ninety of Fenton's finest works from American and European collections, representing his achievement in every genre: Romantic landscapes, intimate portraits of the royal family, stunning architectural views of England's ruined abbeys and castles, moving reportage of the Crimean War, enchanting Orientalist tableaux, and lush still lifes. Following its appearance at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition will travel to Tate Britain, London.

One of the artists most highly revered by photograph historians and collectors, Fenton was profoundly influenced by the great English Romantic painters and poets of the early nineteenth century. The exhibition takes its title, "All the Mighty World," from William Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," an ode to nature in which the author declares himself "A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive."

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