![Item #325349 [The Cookhouse of the 8th Hussars]. Roger Fenton.](https://jamescumminsbookseller.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/325349.jpg?width=768&height=1000&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1670432600)
The Birth of War Photography
[The Cookhouse of the 8th Hussars].
Sebastopol, Crimea: 1855.
Price: $2,500.00
About the item
Salt print from a wet collodion glass negative, 6 x 7-1/2 inches. Inscribed in ink in the lower right corner "Sebastopol / Lord Raglan" The Birth of War Photography. Some spotting and moderate fading. Tipped to a mount with oval opening.
Item #325349
"Photograph of soldiers from the 8th Hussars gathered around an open air cooking hut/field kitchen. A man stands at the centre of the group holding a large pan while the man sitting in front of him fills his bowl from it. The other soldiers stand, sit and lie around them. To the right a soldier is chopping wood and a Vivandière stands behind them with her left hand on her hip. Fenton's photographic van is just visible to the left" (https://www.rct.uk/collection/2500384)
"In the winter of 1855, Roger Fenton sailed from England on the ship Hecla for the theatre of the Crimean War as an accredited war photographer ... Documentation of battle was a new application of photography ... He took with him a wagon, fitted out as a darkroom, for he was using the wet collodion process ... He returned from the Crimea in July with over three hundred negatives ... The subjects were landscales and portraits – battlefields and fortifications, officers and men. There were no scenes of action; to record them was then beyond the power of the camera ... To a public used to the conventional fantasies of romantic battle painters, these photographs seemed dull, yet they recognized in them the virtue of the camera as a faithful witness..." (Beaumont Newhal, The History of Photography, p. 67).
