Valley of the Shadow of Death is a photograph by Roger Fenton, taken on April 23, 1855, during the Crimean War. It is one of the most well-known images of war. [1]
Valley of the Shadow of Death is a photograph by Roger Fenton, taken on April 23, 1855, during the Crimean War. It is one of the most well-known images of war. [1]
Roger Fenton was sent by Thomas Agnew of Agnew & Sons to record the Crimean War, where the United Kingdom, the Second French Empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire were fighting a war against the Russian Empire. The place of the picture was named by British soldiers The Valley of Death for being under constant shelling there. [1] When in September 1855 Thomas Agnew put the picture on show, as one of a series of eleven collectively titled Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol in Eleven Parts in a London exhibition, he took the troops'—and Tennyson's—epithet, expanded it as Valley of the Shadow of Death with its deliberate evocation of Psalm 23.
Film-maker Errol Morris went to Sevastopol in 2007 to identify the site of this "first iconic photograph of war". [2] He was investigating a second version of the photograph without cannonballs on the road and the question as to the authenticity of the picture. Hitherto opinions differed concerning which one was taken first, but Morris spotted evidence that the photo without the cannonballs was taken first. [3] [4] [5] [6] He remains uncertain about why balls were moved onto the road in the second picture—perhaps, he notes, Fenton deliberately placed them there to enhance the image. However, according to the Orsay Museum, "this is unlikely as the fighting raging around him would probably not have allowed him to do so". [7] The alternative is that soldiers were gathering up cannonballs for reuse and they threw down balls higher up the hill onto the road and ditch for collection later.
There are prints of this photograph at The Royal Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, the Princeton University Art Museum, in Princeton, and the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.
Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist artist.
Roger Fenton was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers.
War photography involves photographing armed conflict and its effects on people and places. Photographers who participate in this genre may find themselves placed in harm's way, and are sometimes killed trying to get their pictures out of the war arena.
Pierre Lanith Petit was a French photographer. He is sometimes credited as Pierre Lamy Petit.
Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse was a French sculptor. He was one of the founding members of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and was made an officer of the Legion of Honour.
Life: 100 Photographs that Changed The World is a book of photographs, that are believed to have pushed towards a change, accumulated by the editors of Life in 2003.
Les Choristes is an 1877 pastel on monotype by French artist Edgar Degas. Part of a series of similar works depicting daily public entertainment at the time, it shows a group of singers performing a scene from the opera Don Giovanni, the only work by Degas depicting an operatic performance without dancers.
Valley of the Shadow of Death may refer to:
Jean Adolphe Braun was a French photographer, best known for his floral still lifes, Parisian street scenes, and grand Alpine landscapes.
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours was a French optician and daguerreotypist. He is best known today for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs redrawn by hand as Aquatint engravings.
Peter Wickens Fry was a pioneering English amateur photographer, although professionally he was a London solicitor. In the early 1850s, Fry worked with Frederick Scott Archer, assisting him in the early experiments of the wet collodion process. He was also active in helping Roger Fenton to set up the Royal Photographic Society in 1853. Several of his photographs are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets is an 1872 oil painting by Édouard Manet. It depicts fellow painter Berthe Morisot dressed in black mourning dress, with a barely visible bouquet of violets. The painting, sometimes known as Portrait of Berthe Morisot, Berthe Morisot in a black hat or Young woman in a black hat, is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Manet also created an etching and two lithographs of the same composition.
Ernest Eugène Appert (1830–1891) was a French photographer known for having produced a series of faked photos, titled Crimes de la Commune, meant to discredit the communards protesting in the Paris communes of 1871. His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Getty Museum, the Musée d'Orsay, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Roger Taylor, MVO born 1940, is a curator, photographic historian, and educator specialising in nineteenth century British photography and its social and cultural history. He is Professor Emeritus of Photographic History at De Montfort University.
Louis-Emile Durandelle was a French architectural photographer. Durandelle is best known for his documentary photographs of the construction of Parisian buildings, including the Eiffel tower and the Paris Opera.
Homage to Delacroix is an 1864 painting by Henri Fantin-Latour painted in homage to the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix who died the year before. The work features a group of painters and writers, all of whom went on to become notable themselves, gathered around a portrait of the late Delacroix. The painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1864. Today the painting is part of the permanent collection of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
L'Entente Cordiale is a black-and-white photograph by English photographer Roger Fenton, taken in 1855. The picture was part of the large number taken by Fenton during the Crimea War, where he was one of the first war photographers.
Pasha and Bayadère is a black and white photograph by English photographer Roger Fenton, taken in 1858. It belongs to a group of pictures where Fenton staged scenes inspired by the Middle East exoticism and also by the artistic movement of orientalism.
This episode, which was originally podcast on 24 September 2012, was amended on 5 October 2012.