Valley of the Shadow of Death is an albumen print 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] The photo is one of 360 taken by Fenton of the war. [2]
Valley of the Shadow of Death is an albumen print 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] The photo is one of 360 taken by Fenton of the war. [2]
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. [3] 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". [4] 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. [5] [6] [7] [8] 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". [9] 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. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]
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.
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Roger Fenton was a British photographer, noted as one of the first war photographers.
Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray was a French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, print-maker, and photographer. He has been called "the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century" because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and "the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making." He was an important contributor to the development of the wax paper negative.
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.
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.
Jean Adolphe Braun was a French photographer, best known for his floral still lifes, Parisian street scenes, and grand Alpine landscapes.
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.
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.
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.
Georgia O'Keeffe – Torso, also known as Georgia O'Keeffe – Nude, is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918. It is one of the more than 300 photographs that he took of his future wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
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.
Balzac, the Open Sky is a black and white photograph taken by American photographer Edward Steichen in 1908. The photograph is part of a series created by Steichen that depict the statue of Honoré de Balzac by Auguste Rodin, executed in plaster, in 1898. The statue would eventually be cast in bronze and inaugurated in Paris, in 1939.
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 Crimean 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.