History of Photography — Module 04: War, Imperialism, and Photography as a Social Force
In the mid-nineteenth century, photography rapidly evolved into a powerful tool for documenting and shaping the social world. Initially deployed during conflicts like the Crimean and American Civil Wars, photographers such as Roger Fenton and Alexander Gardner captured battlefields, fundamentally shifting the public's perception of war. Simultaneously, photography facilitated imperial expansion and topographical surveys, with figures like Timothy O'Sullivan and Francis Frith documenting the American West, Asia, and the Middle East. As the medium expanded into a lucrative mass-market industry, it commodified human experience, broadening global awareness while ultimately desensitizing audiences to the harsh realities of conflict and colonial domination.
19th Century Photography
and the Social World
War and Photography
The Crimean War: Roger Fenton’s sanitized, politically motivated photographs avoided the gruesome realities of conflict and supply shortages.
The American Civil War: Alexander Gardner and others captured unflinching, brutal realism, bringing the "earnestness of war" to the public.
Communication and Adaptation: Photographers established makeshift field darkrooms, and methods like photographically reduced text on carrier pigeons advanced wartime communication.
Business and Architecture of Early Photography
Division of Labor: Prominent figures like Mathew Brady often conceptualized and managed studios, while uncredited field operators pushed the camera button and publishers/engravers distributed the images.
Vernacular Photography: The market exploded with cheap, accessible portraits, such as the tintypes produced in military camps by the Bergstresser brothers.
The Mass Market: The desire to own images sparked one of the first mass-marketed media industries globally.
Imperialism and Global Expansion
"Small Wars" and Conquest: Photography followed Western economic interests and military campaigns, such as Felice Beato's documentation of the Second Opium War in China and the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny.
The Grand Tour: Photographers like Francis Frith and John Murray captured iconic monuments in the Middle East and India, satisfying a Western appetite for the exotic.
Topographical Surveys and the American West
Government and Railroad Expansion: Survey teams used photography to scout railroad routes, determine artillery ranges, and map undiscovered terrain.
The "Commercial Sublime": Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan constructed images of the West as an untouched "primordial paradise," deliberately erasing traces of indigenous peoples and industrial mining.
Conservation: Photographic records of vast geological wonders played a crucial role in establishing national parks like Yellowstone.
The Paradox of the Lens
Rationalizing Domination: Photography often provided visual justifications for imperial and economic expansion by framing indigenous populations as obstacles to civilization.
Desensitization: While the sheer volume of mass-produced stereographs and cartes-de-visite brought the world to the consumer, it also taught the public how to "ignore or forget" images when confronted by an overwhelming excess of them.
Roger Fenton arrived in the Crimea in 1855 with equipment, a converted wine merchant's wagon for a darkroom, and a clear understanding of what he was not going to photograph. The newspapers had already published accounts of soldiers dying from cholera and cold, of supply failures and military incompetence. Fenton's assignment, backed by a print publisher and conducted under the implicit expectations of a government that had tried twice to counter the bad press, was to produce something else. He made portraits of officers looking comfortable. He photographed soldiers at leisure, as if they had been transplanted from a country house weekend. His most famous image, a road strewn with cannonballs, achieved its power precisely because it showed no bodies. The public praised his photographs for their factual quality. That praise tells you everything about what the public was willing to accept as fact.
Gardner operated differently. When he photographed the battlefield at Antietam, he showed what Fenton had not. The New York Times wrote that Brady, whose name was on Gardner's work, had done something very like laying bodies in the dooryards of the city. The public went to see the photographs. The question of whether they went because they wanted to understand the war or because they wanted the experience of witnessing it without the danger of being present was not much asked at the time. Gardner understood the question even if he did not ask it. At Gettysburg he moved a body to a stone wall, positioned the head, leaned a rifle against the wall as a prop, and made a photograph that he published as Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. The arrangement was not a secret. The public accepted it as true in a larger sense than fidelity to visual fact. This was the agreement that war photography made with its audience from the beginning.
What the surveys of the American West produced was something more subtle and in some ways more lasting. Watkins and O'Sullivan photographed landscapes of extraordinary scale and emptiness, without a human figure in the frame. The choice looked like aesthetic restraint. It was also an argument. A landscape without people in it is not a wilderness. It is a vacancy. The photographs that helped establish Yellowstone as a national park and fueled the appetite for westward expansion were images from which the people who had been living there for centuries had been carefully removed. The camera did not lie. It selected.
That division between the person who conceptualizes an image and the person who executes it remains relevant in commercial photography today. Scott Parker Photo operates as photographer, producer, and creative director. scottparkerphoto.com/fashion.