Harnessing the power of the realism perceived in photography to shape public opinion, the British government sought to document the war as a means of uniting the public behind their increasingly unpopular war efforts. When the Crimean war began six years later in 1853, photography’s usefulness as a means of documenting, sharing, and digesting ‘factual’ knowledge of historic events was widely acknowledged. The first attempt to photograph a war was not necessarily done with journalistic intentions–though this would change in future conflicts. Small and encased in glass for protection of their delicate, mirror-like surface, daguerreotypes were precious objects rather than devices that could efficiently distribute information to the masses. It should be noted that the daguerreotype process had one more limitation that makes these images rather unique within the history of war photography: produced using polished silver-coated copper sheets exposed with mercury vapors, the process yielded a single, mirror-like positive image which could not be reproduced. Little attention was given to the realities of death or soldier experiences between battles. Until the eye of the camera was turned on war, prints, drawings, and paintings fulfilled the need to document such happenings, generally representing them as action-oriented, clean, and heroic undertakings, as seen in the example of the above Currier & Ives print depicting the impossibly pristine death of Major Ringgold during the Battle of Palo Alto. However, the lack of action or heroism found in these anonymous photographs represented a departure from tropes of war imagery that would redefine war as seen by the public. Daguerreotypes were laborious to produce, endangering the photographer in battles, and exposure times ranging from several seconds to many minutes rendered moving subjects as mere blurs. In The Emergence of Modern War Imagery in Early Photography, Bernd Hüppauf writes “It can be argued that after hundreds of years of battle painting which, with few exceptions, was devoted to heroic images of war, it was the ‘democratization of images’ through photography from the mid-nineteenth century onward that exposed the moral question of war as one of pictorial representation.” The anonymous photographer’s stylistic choices would have been determined by personal safety and technological limitations of the time. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ![]() Nathaniel Currier, Death of Major Ringgold, 1846.
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