Crimea in the Round
John Hannavy looks at panoramas of the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War.
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.
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