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Roger Fenton’s killing fields

Roger Fenton’s first letter from his Crimean expedition (to his wife, Grace) is dated from Gibraltar, February 27, 1855. He reports on his familiar “troubles” (“it was the old story, sea sick as if I had never been on salt water before”) and various attempts to get good views of the land. They weren’t always successful, some almost missed as he lay in his bunk: “I managed to get on deck in the Afternoon in fact the Captain dragged me up as the sight was too fine to be lost... .” By the end of the letter, he describes scenery in more detail: “a beautiful view of the rock capped with mist & beyond, the Bay covered with shipping [and] a magnificent view of the African coast... .” At this point, the letter breaks off: “so much for the poetry of the situation, as far as the prose of it they cannot get my portmanteau & if his Excellency the Govenor (sic) should ask me to dine with him I should be obliged to ask his Excellency to lend me a clean shirt” (Fenton Letter #1). My focus in this essay is on a very different but (as we will see) not unrelated response by Fenton to the Crimean landscape: his most famous photograph, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Figure 1). To concentrate on a single image is not to dismiss the importance of or the sustained interest in his Crimean photographs collectively, demonstrated most recently by the 2018–2019 exhibit at the Queen’s Gallery, London—advertised (not with complete accuracy) as “the first exhibition to focus exclusively on Roger Fenton’s pioneering photographs of the Crimean War, taken in 1855.” For that matter, as Orlando Figes’ 2010 study suggests, there is continuing attention to the Crimean War itself. Yet “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” stands apart, singled out by viewers for its power from the time of its first exhibition up to more recent and wellknown commentaries by Susan Sontag and Errol Morris (to which I will return). It is, I would argue, a special case, and as such provides a useful case study for what Barthes terms a “history of looking.” And such a history, Barthes suggests, begins on the personal scale (Barthes 1980). Hence, my point of departure in the previous paragraph: Fenton looking, and reporting on his own viewing habits, including some that may seem to us unexpected. Fenton was, as may be apparent already, an inconsistent observer. If the evocative depth of his iconic battlefield photograph seems to bespeak a deep sensitivity to landscape, the