A Quiet Day in the Mortar Battery
Roger Fenton (English, 1819–1869)
1855
- Medium
- Salted paper print, from the album "Photographic Pictures of the Seat of War in the Crimea" (1856)
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 24 × 34.6 cm (9 1/2 × 13 5/8 in.); Mount: 41.7 × 53 cm (16 7/16 × 20 7/8 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Photography Gallery Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Socially well connected and prominent in photographic circles, Roger Fenton was commissioned to document the British military during the Crimean War. He spent March through June 1855 with the troops, producing 350 wet-plate glass negatives in his horse-drawn darkroom; they were later shown in exhibitions and published in portfolios for purchase. Because of technical limitations and his presumed upper-end clientele, these earliest images of war do not depict death and battle, but rather a more civilized—even languid, as seen here—view of the conflict. Hugh Edwards maintained that practicing photographers and the public needed to learn from past masters, and he acquired two albums of Fenton’s Crimean photographs.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
