This is the first famous photograph of war.
It’s called “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and it was taken by British photographer
Roger Fenton in 1855.
During the first war to be photographed: the Crimean War.
A bloody and confusing three-year conflict fought between Russia and an alliance of the
Ottoman Empire, United Kingdom, France, and Sardinia.
The photo is part of a large collection taken by Fenton.
Who was sent to Crimea – a peninsula on the Black Sea in Eastern Europe – to bring
the war to life through photography.
Most of the images depict camp life and portraits of soldiers.
But this one is unique.
Not because there’s no one in it.
But because out of the hundreds of photos Fenton took while he was in Crimea...
it’s the only one with a second version.
The two photos are almost identical – they show the same devastated landscape,
from the same tripod position, but with one key difference.
The one that became famous shows cannonballs scattered on the road.
And in the second photo, they’re gone.
Or, is this the second photo?
Did Fenton clear the cannonballs from the road?
Or did he put them there himself, as photo historians have alleged?
Which photo shows the truth?
ERROL MORRIS: The fact that there's a pair, by the way, is mysterious in and of itself.
This is Errol Morris,
Oscar-winning documentary director and collector of… unique taxidermy.
MORRIS: It’s my eyeball collection.
Who went down a rabbit hole of research, a trip across the world, and painstaking photo
analysis, just to answer the question:
Which one was taken first?
MORRIS: That became the mystery of this pair of photographs.
MORRIS: It tortured me.
Morris’ journey to find the answer – which he chronicled in a three-part essay in the
New York Times – started with an accusation.
MORRIS: I first read about them in an essay by Susan Sontag.
Sontag, an American writer and filmmaker, argued that the famous photo was manipulated
by Fenton.
That he photographed the scene as he found it, then “oversaw the scattering of cannonballs
on the road” to stage the second image.
For simplicity, Morris refers to these photos as “ON” and “OFF.”
MORRIS: And so the argument is that “ON” is posed.
MORRIS: And he put them on the road in order to create a more dramatic image.
MORRIS: But there should be some kind of evidence independent of conjectures about Fenton’s
psychology.
MORRIS: How from the photographs themselves and from contemporaneous accounts can I decide
which is which?
Fenton, in a letter to his wife, says that he took “2 good pictures” in the Valley
of the Shadow of Death that day.
But there’s no mention of which came first, or what happened in the span of time between
the two exposures.
Five interviews with photo historians and museum curators with expert knowledge on Fenton
left Morris with contradictory conclusions about which photo makes more sense to have
been taken first.
And whether or not Fenton wanted to add drama to the scene.
MORRIS: Well, maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. That doesn't tell me which photograph was
taken first.
MORRIS: Which comes first, “ON” or “OFF”, “OFF” or “ON?”
The answer would have to come from somewhere within the photos themselves.
MORRIS: Well, I tried everything.
MORRIS: At first I thought that the shadows…
Maybe if he could better understand the positions of the shadows around objects in the photos,
Morris could determine which one was taken later in the day.
So, naturally, he flew to the Crimean peninsula.
And with the help of a local guide, trekked to the exact spot in the Valley of the Shadow
of Death where Fenton had stood 150 years earlier.
MORRIS: I actually got a cannonball, and placed the cannonball, photographed it at various
times of day.
MORRIS: Hoping the shadows would provide the ultimate clue as to before and after.
And what did you determine? I mean, you had the ball in your hand, you photographed it,
you knew which way he was facing. Did that help?
MORRIS: No, it didn't.
MORRIS: I could not reliably decide which came first.
There’s just too many variables in the chemical processes required to take photos back then
to make a reliable guess about what the lighting conditions were.
MORRIS: Going to the Crimea, getting a cannonball, finding the actual place in which these photographs
were taken.
MORRIS: Still no definitive answer.
Morris was right about one thing from the beginning though: the solution to which of
these photos was taken first is in the photographs themselves.
He was just looking in the wrong place.
Obsessing over the cannonballs made sense, but the solution isn’t here.
It’s here. A friend of Morris’s spotted it.
These rocks moved, and that revealed something about what happened in the time between the
two photos being taken.
MORRIS: If people are walking in this scene, gravity is going to pull them from a higher
elevation to a lower elevation.
MORRIS: And by observing the motion of these rocks. We can decide which came first.
These rocks determined that ON — the one with the cannonballs in the road — was,
in fact, taken second.
MORRIS: Without even looking at the cannonballs. How irritating!
The photo we now know to be taken second was displayed in London in 1855, along with Fenton’s
other photographs of the war.
Press reviews of the exhibit celebrated the new medium of photography, and praised its
accuracy in documenting evidence.
They singled out The Valley of the Shadow of Death as a must-see.
One reviewer said the photo, which is “literally covered with projectiles” showed with “terrible
distinctness” what British soldiers had “dared and encountered.”
MORRIS: The relationship between a photograph and reality is complicated.
MORRIS: Complicated at best.
After months of investigation, interviews, and dead ends, Morris definitively figured
out the order of these photos.
“OFF” comes before “ON.”
But ultimately, we can’t really know why these cannonballs were put on this road.
Or even know for sure if Fenton is the one who moved them.
There are accounts of British soldiers picking up cannonballs to fire back at the Russians,
so maybe that’s what was happening here.
All we know from the two photos, though, is that somebody moved them, for some reason.
MORRIS: Every photograph is essentially a mystery.
MORRIS: And it’s a mystery that asks us to figure it out.
Someone walked through this scene.
They knocked these rocks downhill as they carried cannonballs to the road.
And seeing that brings us a little closer to one afternoon in 1855 in the Valley of
the Shadow of Death.
Even though these two photos are the only nearly-identical pair in Fenton’s Crimea
collection, there’s another shot he attempted multiple times.
It’s a self portrait – dressed in a Zouave Uniform.
The Zouaves were a multinational infantry regiment fighting for the French.
And they were among the groups of soldiers that Fenton photographed in Crimea.
They originated mostly in Algeria, but also came from other parts of North Africa that
were under French colonial rule.
Their uniforms were recognizable for their baggy pants and their head coverings, called
chéchias.
Fenton photographed himself several times dressed in a Zouave uniform he was given –
– and misleadingly captioned it “a zouave” without context.
For the record, these are actual Zouaves.
Also, if you want to read Errol Morris’s full essay on “The Valley of the Shadow
of Death,” I linked that in the description.
That essay was a huge inspiration when I was first figuring out what Darkroom would look
like as a series, so it’s really exciting to get to break down these two photos for
an episode. And this is the last one of season two.
Go check out some of the older ones in the playlist if you haven’t seen those, and
as always, thanks for watching.