Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
The Photograph Man
By James Fenton
All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860
Catalog of the exhibition by Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm Daniel, and Sarah Greenough
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 17, 2004–January 2, 2005; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, February 1–April 24, 2005; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 24–August 21, 2005; and Tate Britain, London, September 21, 2005–January 2, 2006
Yale University Press, 290 pp., $65.00
The first war photographer, according to some versions, was Carol Popp de Szathmari, a Romanian amateur painter who photographed the Russian generals at the start of the Russo-Turkish War in Wallachia in 1854. He followed this with portraits and camp scenes from the Turkish occupation of Bucharest. Then, having equipped a carriage as a mobile darkroom, he pursued the war in the Danube basin, eventually assembling an album of two hundred photographs, which he exhibited in May 1855 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. At the same event, Roger Fenton won a silver medal for some landscape studies. But Fenton could not have seen de Szathmari's exhibit in Paris. He himself was by then in the Crimea, completing what would become a five-month assignment.
Review, 3303 words
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