John Hannavy. History Today. Volume 54, Issue 9, September 2004.
The Crimean War (1853-56) has often been described as the last medieval war and the first modern one. It has also been described as the first war of the photographic age, and Roger Fenton (1819-69) as the first war photographer. War photography in 1855 was very different from the confrontational images we are used to today, and Fenton’s images are better described as ‘photography at war’ rather than ‘photography of war’.
Fenton, who used the cumbersome wet collodion process, took 360 images during a three-month stay in the Crimea in the spring and early summer of 1855, before returning to Britain suffering from malaria. He had hoped to stay long enough to record the fall of the main Russian base at Sevastopol which had been the focus of a Franco-British siege since the previous September. It was not to be. Repeated delays in the proposed British and French attack on the city and the dogged perseverance of the Russians meant that the city had not yet fallen by the time he left in June 1855.
He did, though, produce a significant visual account of the campaign and an illuminating series of letters to his publisher and to his wife, which recounted in vivid written detail what the camera could not capture. The process he used—at a time when photography was only fifteen years old—required the photographer to coat his own plates with light sensitive chemicals just before exposure, and process them immediately afterwards. He needed a darkroom by the side of his camera wherever he went, and for the duration of his stay in the war zone, he was accompanied by his assistant Marcus Sparling at the reins of a converted wine merchant’s van which served as his darkroom and living quarters.
The temperatures in the summer of 1855 were high even by Crimean standards, and Fenton had to take his photographs before 10am, or the heat caused the collodion (guncotton dissolved in ether) to bubble and boil on his plates. Working in the confined space of his horse-drawn darkroom with hot ether fumes must have been appalling.
Revisiting the locations in the summer of 2002, I found trying to take photographs in the midday sun with today’s lightweight and easy-to use equipment was quite challenging enough! By 5am it was warm. To judge from the regular measurements I took of the light levels, by about 6.30am, photography with the slow emulsions of the 1850s probably would have become possible on the plains north of Balaclava, south of Sevastopol. That means that he only had about three and-a-half hours each day before the beat got too great to work in. In and around the port of Balaclava itself, surrounded as it is by high hills, it is unlikely Fenton had sufficient direct sunlight until about 7am, so he had maybe three hours maximum for photography a day; but the last hour would have been uncomfortable for photographer and subject alike. Certainly the long shadows evident in many of his pictures do suggest very early-morning eastern sunlight.
His pictures comprise scenes in Balaclava harbour, camp scenes on the plains to the north, and group and individual portraits of the generals, officers and men who were there. It was not so much that photography was incapable of capturing animated scenes—the bright Crimean sunlight meant that exposures were in many cases almost instantaneous. But battles tended to take place later in the day; and the cumbersome nature of the photographic procedure made preparation before exposure, and processing afterwards, a lengthy process. To get photographer, assistant, camera and horse-drawn darkroom into a position where ‘action’ pictures might have been possible, would have posed too great a risk. In addition, tire middle- and upper-class Victorian public at whom the images were aimed would have considered graphic scenes of the brutality of war to be tasteless. It was not until the American Civil War, almost a decade later, that dead bodies figured in war photographs.
Photography in the Crimea was, therefore, restricted to scenes before and after encounters, and portraits taken in the safety of the camps. Fenton’s empty, cannonball-strewn ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ and James Robertson’s views of the devastation after the fall of the Redan and Malakoff forts—the decisive moments at the end of the siege of Sevastopol in early September 1855—were as direct as Crimean War photography got. In none of these grim images is there any direct evidence of the damage inflicted on people—rather it is implied by the scenes of the aftermath.
However, in the early years of the twentieth century, images started to appear in Britain and France which seemed to contradict this traditional view of the photography of the Crimean War. These were photographs that appeared to show battle scenes from the siege of Sevastopol, soldiers in action, guns blazing, and all the now-familiar images of full-scale warfare—images that had hitherto been restricted to the paintings and prinks of artists like William Simpson, semi-official artist of the war. Copies of these photographs surfaced from time to time, and those who ‘discovered’ them always claimed they had happened upon unknown treasures that rewrote the history of the camera at war.
They were first brought to my attention in the 1970s, when I was carrying out research for the exhibition ‘The Camera Goes to War’ for the Scottish Arts Council. A phone call from a photographer told me of a set of twelve images which had been brought to his studio to be copied—the provenance of which could, unfortunately, be traced back only eighty years to the 1890s. They were small ‘gaslight’ prints, claimed , to be copies of the original photographs, which had been bought by the owner’s grandfather in a market in Paris. My attention was drawn to a second set in the 1980s, when a local newspaper in Lancashire was approached by a reader with his ‘treasures’—also small gaslight prints, which had been bought in 1919 for a pound—then a great deal of money—by a sailor, allegedly from a money-changer in Sevastopol harbour. A further set appeared in the mid-1990s in Cheshire, having been passed down through a family ‘from a very ancient uncle’ who had ‘bought them from another sailor’ in the years after the First World War. The sailor, in turn, had allegedly acquired them from a Russian sailor ‘many years before’.
The photographs so far discovered are clearly from two different sets, depicting two quite different segments of the same battle scene. Both are obviously Russian—Russian language captions are included in some. The two sets are substantially different in their treatment of the scene, although both are apparently taken from approximately the same viewpoint in the centre of the siege, though looking in opposite directions.
What were these images, and how had they come about? As recently as 1985, some eminent photographic ‘experts’ were reluctant to label them as ‘fakes’, so realistic did they appear to be. One writer in the 1980s believed them to have been taken with almost instantaneous exposures—citing the absence of blurring in the figures. Others claimed that they were photomontages made in the 1860s, some ten years after the war, while yet others were adamant that they were genuine photographs.
In a sense they were. They were not montages; they were genuine photographs, but genuine photographs not of the siege of Sevastopol, but of one, or perhaps two, huge photo-realistic panoramic paintings. At least one painting was commissioned by the Russian authorities to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the siege.
The history of the photographs—and the subsequent history of the painting—is every bit as fascinating as the story of the war itself.
From the British and French points of view, the ultimate fall of Sevastopol was seen as a crushing defeat for the Russians, but the Russians saw it in an entirely different light. Withstanding the onslaught of the attacking forces for 349 days was celebrated as a magnificent act of heroism on the part of the Russian army. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Russian authorities should have wished to commemorate the event. In deciding upon a panorama painting, they had several precedents. The panorama painting was a popular attraction in the mid-nineteenth century—there were many examples in France, Britain and elsewhere. Indeed, the siege of Sevastopol was immortalised—from the British and French perspective—in a number of both photographic and painted panoramas. Photography played a significant part in the creation of them all, and several photographic panoramas were created during and immediately after the war.
Roger Fenton produced a number of panoramic views on the plains between Balaclava and Sevastopol, which were sold as part of the sets of images of scenes from the war published by Agnew of Manchester and Colnaghi in London. The images show general scenes of the tented British camps on the plains, with static groups of soldiers and a profusion of military equipment. Once hostilities had ceased, the French artists Leon Mehedin and Charles Langlois produced a photographic panorama showing the aftermath of the siege of Sevastopol, and this was later used in the creation of a highly popular panorama painting in Paris. Langlois was a painter who dabbled with photography, so despite the pictures being credited to him it is likely that they were taken by Friedrich Martens, whose enthusiasm for panoramic photographs can be traced back to the 1840s, the era of the daguerreotype. These pictures are devoid of action, however, having been taken well after the siege ended, but they do present an evocative picture of the destruction. The originals survive in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
In Robert Burford’s Panorama Gallery in London’s Leicester Square, a ‘View of the Battle of Sebastopol and the Surrounding Fortifications—the Attack of the Allied Armies’ was displayed between May 1855 and February 1856, being replaced by an even larger panorama ‘View of the City of Sebastopol including the Assaults of the Malahof and Redan’ which continued on display until March 1857. Touring panoramas were displayed in London and Manchester in 1855 and 1856, and at least three others celebrated the same event. All were highly popular with the public. The success of displays like these contrasts rather surprisingly with the lack of success experienced by Roger Fenton in marketing his own Crimean photographs. Photography may have been at the leading edge of Victorian technology, but in terms of public appeal, the vividly painted panoramas—in the tradition of grand history painting—still held sway with the public. Just as the empty street scenes—which typified the years in which photography was restricted by long exposures—were often referred to as ‘cities of the dead’, so the emptiness of the battle scenes of Fenton’s and Robertson’s photographs failed to excite.
The panorama painting of the siege of Sevastopol—which can still be seen in the city of Sevastopol itself—has had a chequered history. The commission to create the panorama dates back to the 1890s, and it is probable that photographs were used as reference, just as with Langlois’ painting in Paris. Completed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1905, the painting was created (mainly in Munich) under the direction of Franz Roubaud (1856-1928), and displayed in a specially built rotunda. Measuring 14 metres high and with a circumference of 115 metres, the scene was viewed from a vantage point representing the lookout platform at the old Malakoff Fort at the centre of the action. The space between the viewing position and the painting itself was a modelled three-dimensional representation of the area immediately surrounding the fort, complete with trenches, gun emplacements and the debris of battle. It is the authenticity of that three-dimensional area which gives the copy photographs their realistic look. It is likely that some of the other panoramas used that same device to add realism.
What survives in a new rotunda today is a reconstruction of the original, which had been destroyed by the Germans during their siege of the city during the Second World War. Some sources describe it as a ‘restoration’ but all that remains of the original are some eighty-six charred fragments rescued by Russian troops, and carried to safety on board the destroyer Tashkent, the last boat to escape from the beleaguered city. Those fragments are now displayed in a lower gallery. The painting was entirely recreated by artists from the Grekov Studio in Moscow to mark the centenary of the siege in 1955, and a new rotunda to house it was opened as recently as the early 1970s. The Grekov studio later produced an immense panorama painting, completed in 1982, entitled, and to commemorate, the ‘Defeat of the German-Fascist Forces at Stalingrad’. In Sevastopol, the surviving fragments of the 1905 painting, together with the copy photographs made of the original—those same photographs which seemed to rewrite the history of war photography—were used as artists’ reference in the creation of the new painting.
There are considerable differences between the old and the new—not least of which is a slightly less photo-realistic representation of the soldiers and the action in some areas of the painting. The trenches and armaments in the space between viewing platform and painting are, if anything, more realistic than the original, and their placement slightly different. The effect is awesome and it is hard to discern where the painting ends and the three-dimensional reconstruction of the Russian trenches starts. The Russians are quite rightly proud of this remarkable and unique museum which really does, in many respects, place the viewer in the centre the battle.
But what of the two sets of photographs? The two groups of pictures are of opposite sites of the battle scene. The more detailed but uncaptioned group of prints centre on the Malakoff Fort and its defenders, while the captioned images show the landscape between the fort and the port of Sevastopol itself. They are clearly from two quite different sets of photographs, but the jury is still out as to whether or not they show the same panorama. They probably do, but so far a complete series has not been located. As might be expected, the detailing of the painting becomes less precise as the action moves further away from the viewing platform. Is it perhaps even possible that the less detailed version while having a clear Russian provenance, thanks to the captioning, may be copies of a quite different Russian painting of the same event? If they are of the 1905 painting, then it would appear that the recreation carried out in the 1950s, while retaining the realism of the 1905 original in some sectors, became more impressionistic in the more distant parts of the scene. The more photographically convincing images may lack the immediate. Russian connection of the captioned series but are very close in layout and detail to the panorama painting as it exists today.
Amidst all this confusion, only one thing remains certain—these images do not rewrite the history of war photography. They do, however, stand as a testament to the skill of the Russian artists, and underline the fact that photographs do not always show what they seem to show.
The Siege of Sevastopol
On September 25th, 1854, the Allied forces, having landed ten days earlier at Calamata Bay and routed the Russians at the Alma, laid siege to the Russian naval base of Sevastopol on the southwest coast of the Crimean peninsula. The Allied commanders Lord Raglan and Francois Canrobert decided to surround the city and attack from the south, and the ensuing delay allowed the Russian commander Edvard Ivanovich Todleben to scuttle his fleet to block the harbour and to prepare his land defences, centred on the Malakoff Heights on the southern shore of Sevastopol bay. The Allied bombardment of the city began, on October 17th, and eight days later a Russian attempt to relieve the siege was defeated at the battle of Balaclava. A further defeat for the Russians occurred at Inkerman on November 5th, after which poor weather and disease intervened to prevent further campaigning until the following spring. A major assault on the part of the French and British was planned for the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 1855, but it was beaten back with heavy loses, and on August 16th the Russians again unsuccessfully attempted to break out. Finally, on September 8th, the French succeeded in storming the Malakoff Heights, which commanded the area, and the Russians evacuated the town after 349 days of campaigning. The fall of Sevastopol was the effective end of hostilities, although officially they continued to March 1856.