# A Quiet Day in the Mortar Battery

- By: Roger Fenton (English, 1819–1869)
- Date: 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
- Credit line: Photography Gallery Fund
- Museum: [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146079)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/5ba94de0-67a9-4424-3749-d191905bca39/full/!1920,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Teens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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