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Pioneers of the Photo Report .. History of Photography ..
Book of Photography

Pioneers of the Photo Report

Photography became a means of communication about 120 years ago when the Illustrated London News published engraved photographs taken on the Crimean War front.

The first photographer to accompany the war campaigns was Roger Fenton, who traveled the battlefields of Crimea in a converted wine seller's wagon, which contained a bed, an oven, food for himself and three horses, five photographic equipment, 700 glass plates, a tent, tools, chemicals, and 366 suitcases. Working conditions in Crimea were unbearable due to the intense heat. Fenton was swarmed with flies and dust, and threatened by cholera and by Russian cannons, for which the wagon was a specific target. Fenton often complained about the difficulty of working with large wet collodion plates in such terrible conditions, and later said: "I would not close my carriage door until the sweat came out of every pore of my skin." Until recently, collodion had dried on the plate, and Fenton could only work between dawn and ten o'clock in the morning. Nevertheless, he succeeded in taking 360 photographs during the war, most of them indirect photographs of groups of soldiers or unimpressive scenes: his employers at the newspaper did not want to disturb readers with scenes of fighting on the battlefield! When Fenton fell ill with cholera, he returned to England and was replaced by James Robinson, with the help of Phyllis Beato, who were less interested in pictures of soldiers than in the aftermath of the devastation of Bla Clava. Until 1880 they did not know how to engrave photographs directly and could only make woodcuts from photographs that had been reproduced in the Illustrated London News. Sometimes, to speed up production, the images were engraved several times by different engravers.

The pioneer of war photojournalism was the American Matthew Brady, an almost legendary figure. Brady was a portrait photographer in the style of Daguerre and felt the need for photographic reportage: he assembled a group of 20 photographers to record the events of the American Civil War. He was thought to be the only war photographer, which was completely wrong: there were others, some better than him. His assistants, Alexander Garner and Timothy O'Sullivan, for example, took some wonderful and terrifying pictures, including the famous Harvest of Death. They worked normally on large-scale wet collodion: which required pauses of 10 seconds or more. Except for the unavoidable technical problems, the plates were too slow and too large to allow for the instantaneous photographs that only became possible when dry plates were invented. O'Sullivan was a pioneering photographer: he went to New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and followed the 49th to Nevada, where he photographed the famous Comostoke Lode mines with magnesium flash. There were vast lands that were known only to the Native Americans until special or government-sent scouts like O'Sullivan came to visit them with their heavy loads of wet collodion plates and brass instruments. The French photographer Auguste Besson climbed to the top of Mont Blanc with Heavy machinery helped him carry 25 porters. When he reached the summit at an altitude of 4810 meters and after defying the avalanches and the bitter cold, he took three clichés and washed them in the melting snow. In 1864, the Englishman Samuel Bourne photographed the Himalayas in Kashmir. He was accompanied by a large group of servants and six assistants. The result was 500 clichés.

Illustrated book publishers requested large images drawn by contact and then pasted onto the pages of the book. Since enlargement was impossible, the size of the images was the same as the cliché, which of course had to be of large dimensions. Francis Freeth, for example, took clichés in Egypt with a machine that used 40 x 50 cm plates, on top of which the collodion was shown boiling under the intense heat of the Nile Delta. In this heroic time of photo reportage, the pioneers had to be brave, persistent and enthusiastic about their work.

War photographer on a cart:

Roger Fenton, the first war photographer on his cart, was previously used by a wine seller who used it to cross the battlefields in the Crimea. He worked for the Illustrated London News, specialising in landscapes and groups of fighters, as he had been ordered not to take pictures that would frighten or terrify readers.

Results of the battle:

A photograph taken in 1855 by Illustrated London News photographer James Robertson and his assistant Felice Beato during the Crimean War.