the art of posing
Recently Errol Morris did a really cool series of (very long) posts on his blog on the New York Times site about the famous pair of photos made by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. Here they are:
Morris’s posts are a fascinating journey through expert opinions, photographic forensics, and an actual trip to the Crimea. I won’t ruin it for you by telling you the outcome of his arduous attempts to discover which of the photos was made first - whether Fenton “posed” the version where the cannonballs litter the road, or whether they were carried off by soldiers as recycled ammo - but to me, there was one glaring omission in his thinking, and that concerns the 19th century attitude toward photography.
Morris’s investigations were prompted by a passage in Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” where she asserts that Fenton put the cannonballs on the road in order to heighten the drama of the picture. While that may (or may not - as I said, I don’t want to ruin it for you) be true, I’m not sure that proving that he did or did not stage the photograph makes the image any less relevant. In the mid-19th century, photography as a medium was vying for a place among the “fine arts.” In its struggle for recognition, and, I would argue, in its relationship to the general culturally-established way of making and interpreting images, it was heavily influenced by notions of pictorialism drawn from the standards of the Academy. If images of war were supposed to be “news” images, they were “news” images in the same sense that etchings were. (In fact, someone did do an illustration of the same place for the London press.)
I think viewers in the 19th century, whether looking at paintings, photographs, or illustrations, would have expected a “pictorial” approach to images - in other words, “posing” would not have detracted from the value of a photograph the way we think it would now. It wasn’t until later that photographs became differentiated from other pictorial arts, and we began to value veracity as an important aspect of their character.
the art of posing
Recently Errol Morris did a really cool series of (very long) posts on his blog on the New York Times site about the famous pair of photos made by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. Here they are:
Morris’s posts are a fascinating journey through expert opinions, photographic forensics, and an actual trip to the Crimea. I won’t ruin it for you by telling you the outcome of his arduous attempts to discover which of the photos was made first - whether Fenton “posed” the version where the cannonballs litter the road, or whether they were carried off by soldiers as recycled ammo - but to me, there was one glaring omission in his thinking, and that concerns the 19th century attitude toward photography.
Morris’s investigations were prompted by a passage in Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” where she asserts that Fenton put the cannonballs on the road in order to heighten the drama of the picture. While that may (or may not - as I said, I don’t want to ruin it for you) be true, I’m not sure that proving that he did or did not stage the photograph makes the image any less relevant. In the mid-19th century, photography as a medium was vying for a place among the “fine arts.” In its struggle for recognition, and, I would argue, in its relationship to the general culturally-established way of making and interpreting images, it was heavily influenced by notions of pictorialism drawn from the standards of the Academy. If images of war were supposed to be “news” images, they were “news” images in the same sense that etchings were. (In fact, someone did do an illustration of the same place for the London press.)
I think viewers in the 19th century, whether looking at paintings, photographs, or illustrations, would have expected a “pictorial” approach to images - in other words, “posing” would not have detracted from the value of a photograph the way we think it would now. It wasn’t until later that photographs became differentiated from other pictorial arts, and we began to value veracity as an important aspect of their character.
Posted 4 years ago
