Question Answered

Last month I blogged about filmmaker Errol Morris and his quest to answer a question about a famous early war photograph called "Valley of the Shadow of Death," by Roger Fenton:



Or, rather, two photographs. That one and another of the same scene with a clear road (i.e., no cannon balls). Which one came first? Was the famous shot staged? Does it make any difference?

Morris's quest to find the answer brought him into contact with many experts and took him to the Crimean and back. Finally, today, he provides the answer:

And so, it turns out that Keller, Haworth-Booth and Sontag are right. It is OFF before ON [the photo above - JDB]. I tried hard to prove that Keller and Sontag were wrong – to prove that ON came before OFF. I failed. I can’t deny it. But I did prove that they were right for the wrong reasons. It is not their assessment of Fenton’s character or lack of character that establishes the order of the pictures. Nor is it sun-angle and shadow. Rather it is the motion of ancillary rocks – rocks that had been kicked, nudged, displaced between the taking of one picture and the other. Rocks that no one cared about. “Those little guys that got kicked aside.” Their displacement was recorded on those wet collodion plates not because someone wanted to record it. It happened inadvertently. Ancillary rocks, ancillary evidence – essential information.

When I first blogged about this series what intrigued me was Morris's skepticism and questioning of the received wisdom that ON was the second photo and that the scene had somehow been altered before it was taken. In the end, that skepticism proved to be unfounded. But that only goes to prove that questioning assumptions and "facts" doesn't always lead to some messy revolution. Sometimes it just becomes confirmation, which is good thing, too.