Making of ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ (by Roger Fenton, 1855), 2015

The story behind the photograph…

A now famous image, showing a barren landscape littered with cannonballs that at first appear like rocks, was one of more than three hundred that constituted the first extensive photodocumentation of war. In 1855, British photographer Roger Fenton (1819–1869) arrived at the Crimean Peninsula, on assignment from the fine arts dealer Agnew & Sons, to photograph the war that was being waged against Russia by England, France, Turkey and Sardinia. He sent back photographs taken on large box cameras with glass-plate negatives that were developed using the difficult and unstable wet-collodion process, additionally hampered by flies and dust. His images included shots of the ‘Valley of Death’, its name borrowed from the 23rd Psalm by British soldiers who faced constant shelling there. Fenton reported in a letter to his wife: ‘in coming to a ravine called the valley of death, the sight passed all imagination [:] round shot & shell lay in a stream at the bottom of the hollow all the way down [;] you could not walk without treading upon them....’ Fenton’s haunting image eschewed portrayal of actual conflict or of the dead and wounded, but captured a profound sense of desolation. Another photograph with fewer cannonballs visible on the right-hand side also exists, which may indicate stage-setting by Fenton.