Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England’s most celebrated and influential photographer during the 1850s, the golden age” of this radically new medium. Fenton’s majestic pictures of cathedrals, country houses, and varied countryside were without peer in Englandas were his views of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain’s power. But Fenton’s choice of subjects ranged more widely still: he was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev; he was commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War, producing early war photographs; and he created theatrical Orientalist costume pictures and a startling series of lush still lifes.
Fenton had first studied law and painting, but soon after he took up the camera he was making photographs that were technically superb and highly original in their handling of composition, perspective, atmosphere, and light. Always he strove to demonstrate that photography could equal the art of painting and even surpass it. He was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which worked to advance the profession and encouraged the exhibition of members’ works throughout Britain. In a career of a single decade, Fenton did much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight.
This exquisitely produced bookthe first comprehensive publication on Fenton in almost twenty yearspresents eighty-five of the artist’s finest photographs and discusses every aspect of his work and his remarkable career.

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852 1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

Arts & Photography

Greenough, Sarah

DANIEL, Malcolm

BALDWIN, Gordon

Individual Artists

Metropolitan Museum of Art

<div> Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England's most celebrated photographer during the 1850s, the young medium's most glorious moment. After studying law and painting, Fenton took up the camera in 1851 and immediately began to produce highly original images. During a decade of work he mastered every photographic genre he attempted: architectural photography, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant. Fenton pictured noble country houses, evocative ruins, and the rolling countryside that surrounded them--majestic summations of rural England. Equally arresting are his muscular views of cathedrals and of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain's power. Possessing flawless technique and an artist's instinct for composition and light, he made photographs that combine the clarity of a newly modern world with the poetry of a Romantic sensibility. Fenton's most compelling landscape works--intense meditations infused with a reverence for nature--call to mind cloud studies by Constable or Turner's explorations of light and atmosphere. Fenton's grasp was wide-ranging. He traveled to Russia in 1852 and was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev. Commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War--which pitted European nations against an expansionist Russia--he returned with portraits of shell-shocked soldiers and confident officers, views of a chaotic Balaklava harbor, and bleak panoramas of the terrain of battle. Sharing the mid-nineteenth-century passion for all things exotic, Fenton produced a series of posed Orientalist costume pictures in which he strove for the theatrical effects of Delacroix and Ingres. A final, remarkable series of lush still lifes triumphantly achieves the same goal that Fenton had sought from the beginning: to demonstrate that photography could equal painting and even surpass it. An active proponent of photography, Fenton was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which encouraged the advancement of the medium and the exhibition of members' works throughout Britain. But in 1862, for reasons both personal and professional, he sold his equipment and negatives, resigned from society, and returned to the practice of law. In a career of a single decade, Fenton had done much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight. This volume presents ninety of Fenton's finest photographs, exactingly reproduced. Six leading scholars have contributed nine illustrated essays that address every aspect of Fenton's career, as well as a comprehensive, documented chronology. [This book was originally published in 2004 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.] </div>

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

From its origins at the end of the 1830s, photography has never ceased to evolve both aesthetically and technologically. The past decade has given rise to the new age of digital photography, so Looking at Photographs, first published in 1991, has been revised and updated to define and illustrate terms from the earliest processes to this new technology. At once a rich and informative glossary and a history of the medium, this fully illustrated guide will be invaluable to all those wishing to increase their understanding and enjoyment of the art of photography.

Looking at photographs: a guide to technical terms

Photography & Video

British Museum Press

This reference guide contains an informative history of photography, with explanations of the technical terms often encountered by gallery patrons and those taking an interest in the background to photographic excellence for the first time. What is a contact print? What is a pinhole camera? What is the difference between a daguerreotype and a tintype, or between a gelatin silver print and a halftone? This work offers definitions and explanations of the techniques, processes and materials used in the making of photographs from the 1830s to the present. Its illustrations are mostly taken from the holdings of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms ("^ALooking at" Series)

Oxford University Press

Roger Fenton's photograph Pasha and Bayadére is a fascinating image in its own right and is an expression of a more general Orientalist craze that grew steadily stronger during the nineteenth century in Europe. In his rich and detailed study, Baldwin explains how this image of a seated man and a dancing woman embodies themes and motifs that can be found in the work of nineteenth-century artists from Eugéne Delacroix to John Frederick Lewis to Alfred Lord Tennyson. He has also brought to light significant new information about the life and career of Fenton, the important Victorian photographer best known for his photographs of the Crimean War.

Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadére (Getty Museum Studies on Art)

J.paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum's collection of over one hundred thousand images is among the most comprehensive holdings of rare and important photographs in the world. It ranges from daguerreotypes to work by contemporary photographers such as Frederick Sommer and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. The fifty selections in this volume include Walker Evans's Citizen in Downtown Havana, The Whisper of the Muse by Julia Margaret Cameron, and Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz, as well as photographs by Carleton Watkins, Andre Kertesz, Man Ray, Lisette Model, and many others. Each image is described in detail by the curatorial staff of the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum.

Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Photographs

J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM

Ranging from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes to more recent work by photographers such as Frederick Sommer and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the J. Paul Getty Museums collection of more than one hundred thousand images ranks among the most comprehensive holdings of rare and important photographs in the world. The latest addition to the Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum series--which includes volumes highlighting the Museums collections of antiquities, decorative arts, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and sculpture--this volume gathers fifty representative selections from the museums renowned Photographs collection. Each image described in fascinating detail by the curatorial staff of the Department of Photographs at the Getty Museum. Including such classics as Walker Evanss Citizen in Downtown Havana, The Whisper of the Muse by Julia Margaret Cameron, and Georgia OKeefe: A Portrait, by Alfred Stieglitz, the volume also features images by Carleton Watkins, André Kertész, Man Ray, Lisette Model, and many others. This book is also available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York: Photography and Fame

This engaging catalog features the photographic portraiture of the nineteenth-century Parisian Nadar and the twentieth-century New Yorker Andy Warhol. The two photographers have more in common than one might suppose, particularly as adroit manipulators who simultaneously promoted their own reputations and those of their subjects. Both men emerged from the Bohemia of their day to become photographers after following earlier artistic pursuits: Nadar as a writer and caricaturist, Warhol as a commercial graphic artist, then painter and filmmaker. While celebrating their individual achievements, Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York also illuminates the role of the visual artist in the conscious creation of celebrity and the changing nature of fame. Among the many portraits in this exhibition catalog are Nadar's photographs of such luminaries as George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jean-François Millet, and Sarah Bernhardt; and Warhols images of celebrities including Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, Jane Fonda, Robert Rauschenberg, Debbie Harry, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Liza Minnelli.

Keller, Judith

History & Criticism

This engaging catalog features the photographic portraiture of the nineteenth-century Parisian Nadar and the twentieth-century New Yorker Andy Warhol. The two photographers have more in common than one might suppose, particularly as adroit manipulators who simultaneously promoted their own reputations and those of their subjects. Both men emerged from the Bohemia of their day to become photographers after following earlier artistic pursuits: Nadar as a writer and caricaturist, Warhol as a commercial graphic artist, then painter and filmmaker. While celebrating their individual achievements, Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York also illuminates the role of the visual artist in the conscious creation of celebrity and the changing nature of fame. Among the many portraits in this exhibition catalog are Nadar's photographs of such luminaries as George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jean-François Millet, and Sarah Bernhardt; and Warhols images of celebrities including Mick Jagger, Truman Capote, Jane Fonda, Robert Rauschenberg, Debbie Harry, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Liza Minnelli.

Eugène Atget (1857-1927) spent nearly thirty years photographing details of often-inconspicuous buildings, side streets, cul-de-sacs, and public sculptures in his beloved Paris. Yet before his death, he was practically unknown outside of that city. His genius was first recognized about 1924 by two young Americans living and working in Paris, Man Ray and his studio assistant, Berenice Abbott, who recognized the elements of contradiction, ambivalence, and ambiguity in Atget's images of Parisian architecture, streets, and parks. Presented in this volume are more than fifty of the Getty Museum's two hundred ninety-five pictures by Atget, with commentary on each image by Gordon Baldwin, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. In Focus: Eugène Atget also contains a chronological overview of his life and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career, with participants Baldwin; David Featherstone, independent editor and curator; photographer Robbert Flick, professor of art at the University of Southern California; independent scholar David Harris; Weston Naef, curator of photographs, Getty Museum; Françoise Reynaud, curator of photographs at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris; and Michael S. Roth, associate director of the Getty Research Institute. This volume of the In Focus series is published to coincide with an exhibit of Atget's images from June 20 through October 18, 2000, at the Getty Museum.

In Focus: Eugene Atget : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

Atget, Eugène

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BALDWIN, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BALDWIN, Gordon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BALDWIN, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852 1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860

Looking at photographs: a guide to technical terms

Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms ("^ALooking at" Series)

Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadére (Getty Museum Studies on Art)

Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Photographs

Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Photographs

Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York: Photography and Fame

Nadar/Warhol: Paris/New York: Photography and Fame

In Focus: Eugene Atget : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum