Page 111 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Impact of Technology on Photographic Reporting

Figure 7.1 Marcus
Sparling is shown
seated on Roger
Fenton’s photography
van. The pair spent
four months in the
Crimea and captured
approximately 300
images of the war
immortalized in
Tennyson’s Charge of
the Light Brigade
(Photograph courtesy
of the U.S. Library of
Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division.)

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(see Figure 7.1), 36 large cases of equipment, five cameras, and 700
glass plates.
Fenton was there to document the war that many of you know of
through the poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson. His
approach to his work was influenced by the technology of his time.
The collodion process that he used for making his negatives required
that the plates be exposed before the emulsion dried out, a difficult
challenge in the hot spring and summer weather.
Many of the exposures took half a minute or more, so action pictures
were not possible. Making matters worse, the van itself became an
attractive target for Russian artillery. Fenton narrowly escaped injury
once when the roof was blown from the wagon and again while setting
up one of the cameras.
Fenton, like his American Civil War counterparts organized by
Matthew Brady (see Figure 7.2), was relying on direct distribution of