More Than Mere Photographs

The wall text that introduces the pictures of Scotland and Wales in "All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-60" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art concludes with a contemporaneous quote from the Journal of the Photographic Society. "No one can touch Fenton in landscape. There is such artistic feeling about the whole of these pictures ... that they cannot fail to strike the beholder as being something more than mere photographs." On behalf of Fenton, I resent "mere."

Roger Fenton was one of the most conspicuous of the first generation of English photographers. Once he became interested in photography in the early 1850s, he not only quickly demonstrated his talent as a photographer, but also worked to elevate the status of the art. He was the primary mover in the establishment of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), an organization modeled after other British institutions intended to foster interest in various arts and sciences. He was the first to publish photographs of Moscow, the first to photograph a war (the Crimean), the first to be the official photographer of a museum (the British), a first-rate architectural photographer, a great landscape photographer ("No one can touch Fenton ..."), a sensitive portrait photographer, a skilled photographer of still lifes, an imaginative producer of Oriental tableaux-vivantes, and he did all this in the 12 years before he sold his cameras, darkroom equipment, and negatives, and returned to the practice of law. Victorian gentlemen were not lazy.

"Mere?" It was not easy to bring a photograph into being in the 1850s: The chemical processes were trying and had to be performed in a narrow time frame. Since Fenton frequently shot in remote areas, particularly in the case of his Crimean War pictures, all this work had to be done in specially outfitted mobile vans. But in any case, there is nothing "mere" about producing a beautiful photograph. In addition to technical skill, it takes an eye, and that Fenton had. Visitors to the Met will find little "mere," and much to admire.

Because of the large glass plates he used for negatives in most of his pictures, they are rich in detail. "Valley of the Ribble and Pendle Hill" (1859) is a deep prospect over a broad plane. In the near foreground is a placid stream, then a small rocky shoal, then the bank of the stream and a row of trees, then a field with one crop and another field with a different crop, then the stream winding around in back, and more fields, and more trees, and then low hills and an occasional building, and then way in the distance a ridge of mountains is seen through a haze. This is a lot of visual information, but it is Fenton's talent to be able to organize it into a harmonious whole, to make us feel that if we were not there to see this bucolic vista ourselves, how fortunate we are someone made a proxy we can recognize it by.

However, Fenton was not wedded to detail when he had another purpose in mind. "Landscape With Clouds" (1856), is mostly about the low, overhanging, moody clouds; all we see of the landscape is an almost black band across the bottom of the picture, the silhouette of a clump of trees to the left, and distant ranges on mountains. This is Wordsworthian in its identification with nature, and very modern in its simple - almost abstract - composition. Here Fenton wanted us to feel the landscape as much as see it.

Another side of this 19th-century attention to nature is the interest in ruins of noble buildings, especially church buildings: cathedrals, abbeys, and cloisters. The English have never totally disavowed their Druidic past, (cf. E.M. Forster's "Howards End"), and maybe they expect the pagans to come back into the land and reclaim the sacred sites. At any rate, the spectacle of a church fallen into decay is a powerful impetus to reflection. Rievaulx Abbey, the remains of the 13th-century Rievaulx Abbey anyway, was near the home of Fenton's wife's family, and he took several photographs there. Its fallen state is not apparent in "Rievaulx Abbey, Doorway, North Transept" (1854): We only see the doorway, which is largely intact, and it is domesticated by a woman in Victorian garb seated there reading, while a young girl in a white flounced dress gets set to climb over the adjacent rail fence. "Rievaulx Abbey, the High Altar" (1854) is shot through the beautiful but exposed arches of the chancel so that we see nature where stained glass Bible scenes might once have been, and the silhouette of a woman on her knees praying. This seems too obvious a setup to be authentic devotion.

"Rievaulx Abbey" (1854) is shot along the axis of the impressive ruined abbey chancel so that we understand how grand an accomplishment this building must have seemed in the 1400s when it was newly consecrated. The arches are in shadow, but the triforium above them is washed out in the bright light admitted by the missing roof, making the building seem less substantial as it rises upward. The wall at the end of the chancel is gone, and through the opening we see shadows, some mostly hidden houses, a hill covered with trees, and an empty sky. A woman dressed in white sits in the chancel amid the grass-grown floor: She gives us a sense of the scale of the building, and - small as she is - the contrary forces of nature and formal religion at play here. The picture conveys a deep reverence for some deity; it is just not clear which.

Photographs become "mere" because - like a somersault - once they are done they look easy. Early in his life, Roger Fenton studied painting in London and Paris but apparently had no special aptitude for it. When he saw the photographs on display at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations - the first World's Fair - in the summer of 1851, he found the proper outlet for his artistic ambitions. He so mastered the new art of photography that when he was done, the range of the possible had been enormously expanded, and a century and a half later, the pleasure of his mere photographs has still not been exhausted.

Until August 21 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).