The most compelling of his views of the English, Welsh, and Scottish countryside call to mind the paintings of Constable and Turner as well as Romantic poems by William Wordsworth that celebrate man’s ties to nature.įenton possessed a particular sensitivity for the play of light and atmosphere in the natural world, a subject he explored throughout the decade of his career with as much determination and success as he did architecture. In landscape photography, too, Fenton was without parallel among his countrymen. His subjects included the Gothic cathedrals of Salisbury, Wells, Lincoln, and Lichfield Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and the British Museum Windsor and Balmoral Castles and the ruined abbeys of Rievaulx, Fountains, Rosslyn, and Lindisfarne. He assigned himself the task of photographing the major churches and abbeys of Great Britain and, working most often in a format as large as 14 x 18 inches, wedded perfect technique with an unerring ability to choose the precise vantage point and lighting conditions that would best render the smallest details of architecture, convey a sense of monumentality, and imbue his pictures with a Romantic spirit. Moscow, Domes of churches in the Kremlin by Roger FentonĪs a photographer of architecture, Fenton was without equal in England. He traveled to Russia in 1852 and photographed the landmarks of Kiev and Moscow founded the Photographic Society (later designated the Royal Photographic Society) in 1853 was appointed the first official photographer of the British Museum in 1854 achieved widespread recognition for his photographs of the Crimean War in 1855 and excelled throughout the decade as a photographer in all the medium’s genres architecture, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant. He then revisited Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype process, most likely from Gustave Le Gray who had modified the methods employed by William Henry Fox Talbot, its inventor. In 1849, 18 he exhibited paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy.įenton visited the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in London in 1851 and was impressed by the photography on display there. By 1847 Fenton had returned to London where he continued to study painting under the tutelage of the history painter Charles Lucy, who became his friend and with whom, starting in 1850, he served on the board of the North London School of Drawing and Modelling.
When he registered as a copyist in the Louvre in 1844 he named his teacher as the history and portrait painter Michel Martin Drolling, who taught at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, but Fenton’s name does not appear in the school records. In Yorkshire in 1843 Fenton married Grace Elizabeth Maynard, presumably after his first sojourn in Paris where he may briefly have studied painting in the studio of Paul Delaroche. In 1840, Fenton graduated with a “first class” Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of London, having read English, mathematics, Greek and Latin. In 1841, he began to read law at University College, London, evidently sporadically as he did not qualify as a solicitor until 1847, partly because he had become interested in learning to be a painter. Before taking up the camera, he studied law in London and painting in Paris. Roger Fenton is a towering figure in the history of photography, the most celebrated and influential photographer in England during the medium’s “golden age” of the 1850s. He was born in Crimble Hall, Heywood, Lancashire into a wealthy family.
Roger Fenton was a British photographer born in August 1819, noted as one of the first war photographers.
0 kommentar(er)
