The Valley of the Shadow of Death

A dirt road through a ravine near Sevastopol, littered with Russian cannonballs, photographed by Roger Fenton on 23 April 1855 during the Crimean War. Fenton made two exposures from the same spot within minutes of each other: one with the road itself clear and the balls confined to the ditch beside it, one with balls scattered across the road. The second is the image everyone knows, and for over a century and a half it has been the subject of a genuine scholarly argument about whether Fenton, or an assistant, moved the ammunition into the road to make the picture more dramatic.

In 2007 the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris spent months trying to settle the question and eventually did, using the position of loose stones on the slope above the road rather than anything about the cannonballs themselves. His conclusion, published in the New York Times, is that the empty-road version was taken first. What that proves about Fenton's intentions, and what it does not prove, is treated at length below.

Prints survive in institutional collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The negative itself has not been traced to a known repository.

What the photograph shows

A dirt track runs through a shallow ravine, curving away from the camera between bare, eroded slopes under a flat, overcast sky. There are no figures, no buildings, nothing that reads as a battle. The only content is the ground itself and the objects scattered across it: round iron shot, spent and unexploded, some in the ditches at the base of the slopes and, in the more famous of Fenton's two exposures, dozens more lying in the road.

It is a photograph with nothing happening in it, which is exactly the point later writers have made about it. There is no action a wet-collodion camera of 1855 could have captured in any case; exposures ran to several seconds and required the photographer to sensitize, expose and develop a glass plate before the collodion dried, a window of about ten minutes in temperate weather and less in Crimean heat. What Fenton photographed was aftermath and evidence, a road that soldiers would not walk down without stepping on ordnance, and he let the absence of anyone walking down it carry the description.

The ravine and the siege

The valley lay within range of the Russian batteries defending Sevastopol during the siege that dominated the Crimean War from October 1854 into 1855. British and allied troops used it as a supply route into their forward positions, and it took its name, the Valley of Death, from the volume of Russian round shot that fell short of its intended targets and rolled or lay in the roadway and ditches. It was not the valley made famous a few months earlier by Tennyson's poem about the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, a different location entirely; the two are sometimes confused because both borrow the same phrase from Psalm 23, and this record treats them as distinct.

When Thomas Agnew exhibited Fenton's photographs in London in September 1855, he extended the soldiers' plain nickname to the fuller, more literary Valley of the Shadow of Death, pulling the image explicitly into the register of the Twenty-Third Psalm. The expansion was Agnew's publishing choice, not necessarily Fenton's own name for the place, and it did the work of turning a soldier's grim joke into something closer to scripture.

Fenton's mission to the Crimea

Fenton's trip was funded commercially by the print publisher Thomas Agnew and Sons, who financed the expedition in exchange for the exclusive right to publish and sell the resulting photographs. It also carried a measure of official backing: the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary of State for War, arranged Fenton's passage from England aboard the transport ship HMS Hecla, and Prince Albert supplied letters of introduction to the British commander in the field, FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan. Fenton had already received what one contemporary account calls valuable patronage from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert before he left. The government's interest was not disinterested: the war was deeply unpopular in Britain, William Howard Russell's dispatches for The Times had exposed disastrous mismanagement and neglect of the wounded, and photographs showing an orderly, functioning army served the same purpose army-approved sketches and paintings had always served, with the added authority of a medium widely believed at the time to be incapable of lying.

He landed at Balaklava harbour on 8 March 1855 with two assistants, thirty-six packing cases of equipment, five cameras and 700 glass plates carried in specially grooved boxes, and a converted wine merchant's van fitted out as a mobile darkroom and living quarters. The van's pale colour and size made it a visible target and it came under fire more than once. Working the wet collodion process in the field meant sealing himself into the van to coat, sensitize, expose and develop each plate before the chemistry dried, in heat he described as making perspiration start from every pore, while fighting dust and flies that could ruin a plate in seconds. In under four months, from 8 March to 26 June 1855, he produced roughly 360 usable negatives, a documentary record of an active war on a scale nothing had approached before.

23 April 1855

Fenton's own account, given in his letters home, is that he visited the ravine more than once. His first pass produced a view with the road left clear and the cannonballs confined to the ditches on either side. He returned to the same spot a second time that day, by his own description under active Russian fire, and worked for over an hour before coming away with what he called two good pictures. It is this second visit that produced the negative that shows the road itself scattered with shot.

Fenton wrote to his printseller and sponsor describing what he had seen at close range: round shot and shell lying like a stream at the bottom of the hollow the whole way down, so thick, he said, that a man could not walk without treading on them. That sentence, not the photograph, is the primary description of the site as Fenton actually found it on first encountering the valley, and it is worth holding onto when weighing what the second exposure adds to it.

The two-version question

The two negatives are the same composition from the same camera position, differing only in where the cannonballs lie: one with the road surface clear and the shot confined to the ditch below the bank on the left, one with a large number of balls distributed across the road itself. The second is the negative Agnew published and exhibited, the one reproduced in nearly every textbook account of early war photography, and the one usually meant when people refer to Valley of the Shadow of Death without qualification.

The German art historian Ulrich Keller was among the first to argue in print that Fenton, or an assistant working for him, moved the shot onto the road between the two exposures to strengthen the composition. Susan Sontag took up the claim in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), writing that before taking the second picture, the one that is always reproduced, Fenton oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself. It is important to be precise about what Sontag did and did not argue: she treated the staging as effectively established by Keller's account and used it as a case study in how even the earliest war photography could not be assumed to show events exactly as they occurred, not as a claim she herself proved from new evidence. The Musee d'Orsay's own curatorial position, by contrast, has held that deliberate staging under the conditions Fenton described, ongoing shelling of the position, is unlikely, since the danger would probably not have allowed for it.

Errol Morris and the shadow of a stone

The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris took up the question at length, publishing his findings in the New York Times beginning 25 September 2007 in a multi-part essay titled Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?, later expanded as the opening chapter of his book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (2011). Morris traveled to the site near Sevastopol, consulted historians who split roughly evenly between believing the scene was staged and believing that soldiers had later gathered the spent shot from the surrounding ground and piled it on the road for collection and reuse, built a physical sundial on location to test the sun's position against the photographs' shadows, and corresponded with meteorologists and optics specialists in an attempt to date and sequence the two exposures from first principles. Much of this effort, by his own account, proved inconclusive.

The resolution came from a different piece of the frame entirely. The optical engineer Dennis Purcell, working with Morris, noticed a small group of loose stones on the slope to the left of the road whose position differs between the two photographs: in the image with cannonballs on the road, the stones sit measurably lower on the slope than they do in the clear-road image. Stones do not move uphill on their own. Since gravity only explains a downhill shift, the picture in which the stones sit lower must have been taken after the picture in which they sit higher. That places the clear-road exposure first and the cannonballs-on-the-road exposure second, which means whatever moved the stones, most plausibly Fenton and his assistant walking the ground to place the shot, happened between the two exposures rather than before either of them.

The Royal Collection Trust's own published account of its print reaches the same sequence independently, noting that Fenton made at least two distinct views from the position and that the version with fewer cannonballs on the ground indicates he rearranged the scene for the second.

What the stone evidence proves, and what it does not

Morris's rock analysis is good physical evidence for sequence: it establishes, about as firmly as this kind of forensic photo-history can establish anything, that the empty-road exposure came before the cannonballs-on-the-road exposure. It is not, by itself, evidence of motive. Morris was careful in his own writing to note that Fenton had legitimate documentary reasons to want a second, more explicit view of the danger the road represented, given that his stated task was to convey the true conditions of the war to a home audience already primed by press reports of mismanagement. The stones do not tell us whether Fenton considered rearranging ordnance on an active battlefield a legitimate act of illustration, a piece of theatrical embellishment he would have recognized as such, or simply the way any photographer with a camera and an available prop might have approached a picture he wanted to make stronger. What the evidence rules out is the possibility, floated by some of Morris's interviewees, that soldiers moved the balls off the road after Fenton photographed it full; the sequence runs the other way. It does not rule out Sontag and Keller's reading of intent, nor does it fully vindicate the Musee d'Orsay's skepticism that staging was practically possible under fire; it settles the order of the two exposures and leaves the question of what that order means for Fenton's honesty as a documentarian open, which is where this record leaves it as well.

Publication and exhibition, 1855-56

Fenton returned to England on 26 June 1855, in poor health and having contracted cholera on the journey home. Agnew opened an exhibition of 312 of his Crimean photographs on 20 September 1855 at the Water Colour Society's rooms in Pall Mall East, London. Between November 1855 and 5 April 1856, Agnew issued 337 of the photographs commercially on printed mounts, sold individually or grouped into sets; two multi-part panoramas were issued alongside the single sheets, an eleven-photograph Panorama of the Plateau of Sebastopol and an eight-photograph panorama of the plains of Balaklava and the valley of Inkerman. Valley of the Shadow of Death was not part of either panorama; it was sold as an individual sheet, which is the form in which the institutional prints catalogued below survive.

The exhibition and publication served their sponsors' purposes. Contemporary reviewers and, later, historians have generally read the Crimea photographs, this one included, as reassurance aimed at an anxious public rather than as war reportage in the modern sense: the war Fenton pictured is orderly, well-supplied and largely bloodless, in deliberate counterpoint to what Russell's newspaper dispatches had already told readers.

What happened to the negatives

Agnew sold the unsold stock of Fenton's Crimean prints and negatives at auction in 1856. Fenton himself continued working as a photographer for several more years, including as one of the founders of the Photographic Society of London in 1853 and, later, as the first official photographer engaged by the British Museum, before giving up photography altogether. In October 1862 he announced his retirement from the profession and put his equipment and his entire remaining stock of negatives, reported at the time as more than a thousand large-format glass plates, up for auction. The negative for Valley of the Shadow of Death has not been traced to a known present-day repository in the sources consulted for this record; what survives are prints made from it before the negative left Fenton's or Agnew's hands.

In 1950 the collector and historian Helmut Gernsheim located a Fenton descendant and purchased what was described as Fenton's own complete set of 360 mounted salted-paper prints of the Crimean campaign for 50 pounds, a set that included this image and that Gernsheim later published and eventually placed with the University of Texas, where it forms part of the Crimean War holdings at the Harry Ransom Center. This is a separate body of material from the individually catalogued prints in the museums discussed below, and there is no evidence in the sources consulted that the two lines of descent overlap in any specific traceable sheet.

Where prints are held today

Because Fenton's negative was printed many times for sale rather than existing as a single unique object, provenance for Valley of the Shadow of Death has to be tracked institution by institution rather than as one continuous chain, and most individual acquisition histories before a print's arrival at its current museum are not published in detail. What is documented: the Library of Congress holds a salted paper print, sheet 28 by 36 centimetres, purchased in 1944 along with 262 other Fenton prints from his grandniece, Frances M. Fenton, a set the library's own catalogue notes may represent a group Fenton or Agnew kept and annotated themselves. The Victoria and Albert Museum's print (museum number 64:856) entered the collection through the Townshend Bequest. The Princeton University Art Museum's print (object x1991-193) was acquired by museum purchase through an anonymous gift; its mount carries the publication credit of Thomas Agnew and Sons together with the print dealers Colnaghi's and Williams and Co. The J. Paul Getty Museum's print carries an accession number in the 84.XM series, which identifies it as part of the roughly 26,000-object photography collection assembled by Samuel Wagstaff and acquired by the Getty in 1984, the founding acquisition of the museum's Department of Photographs; the Getty's online catalogue lists at least two Fenton prints of this title under separate object records, consistent with more than one impression, though the source pages consulted did not specify which shows which version of the road. The Royal Collection's print is catalogued as RCIN 2500514. The Musee d'Orsay, the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago each hold at least one print; the Art Institute's public-domain repository record explicitly labels its print the first version, i.e. the clear-road exposure, which is one of the few institutional records in the sources consulted to make the version distinction explicit in its own metadata.

The market for this image

Prints of Valley of the Shadow of Death appear at auction periodically as part of general nineteenth-century photography sales rather than as a market unto themselves. The most recent documented sale in the sources consulted was at Swann Auction Galleries in New York on 27 April 2023, as part of a Fine Photographs sale featuring works from the Stephen White Collection: a salted paper print of the image sold against a pre-sale estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 US dollars, with a reported price of 22,500 US dollars. The sources consulted for this record report that single figure without specifying whether it represents the hammer price alone or the total including buyer's premium, and this record does not assert a hammer/premium split it cannot verify; see notes_for_editor. No auction result for this specific title exceeding that figure was located in the sources consulted, though the search was not exhaustive of every regional and specialist photography sale since the 1980s and a higher price at another house cannot be ruled out.

What is still unresolved

The order of the two exposures is now about as settled as photo-forensic evidence can make it. What remains genuinely open is everything upstream and downstream of that fact: whether Fenton saw what he did as staging in any sense he would have found troubling, what became of the glass negative itself, and how each individual institutional print travelled from Agnew's 1855-56 publication run into the specific collection that holds it now. These gaps are recorded plainly in open_questions rather than papered over, in keeping with the rule that a documented gap is worth more than an invented bridge.