Provenance
-1984
Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., American, 1921 - 1987, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.
Main Image
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Valley of the Shadow of Death
Roger Fenton (English, 1819 - 1869)
English
Crimea, Ukraine (Place Created)
April 23, 1855
Salted paper print
84.XM.504.23
27.6 × 34.9 cm (10 7/8 × 13 3/4 in.)
...in coming to a ravine called the valley of death, the sight passed all imagination: round shot and shell lay like a stream at the bottom of the hollow all the way down, you could not walk without treading upon them...
--Roger Fenton
Fenton's most famous photograph is also one of the most well-known images of war. Across a desolate and featureless landscape, not a single figure can be found. The landscape is inhabited only by cannonballs--so plentiful that they first appear to be rocks--that stand in for the human casualties on the battlefield. The sense of emptiness and unease is heightened by the visual uncertainty created by the changing scale of the road and the sloping sides of the ravine.
Borrowing from the Twenty-third
On a commissioned assignment, Fenton traveled in 1853 to the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea, where England, France, and Turkey were fighting a war against Russia. To avoid offending
Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., American, 1921 - 1987, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984.
Corcoran Gallery of Art. A Book of Photographs from the Collection of Sam Wagstaff. (New York: Gray Press, 1978), p. 21.