Picquet House, Cathcart's Hill, from General Bosquet's Quarters 1855

Roger Fenton made this photograph, "Picquet House, Cathcart's Hill, from General Bosquet's Quarters," using the wet collodion process. This was a cutting-edge technology at the time, requiring portable darkrooms and skillful manipulation of chemistry in the field. The resulting albumen print gives us a vista of military life during the Crimean War, the repetitive, almost abstract pattern of the tents suggesting the scale of the conflict. Yet, paradoxically, the process of wet collodion was ill-suited to capturing action; the long exposure times meant that only stationary subjects could be recorded. Fenton, therefore, could not show the realities of battle, but instead focused on the infrastructures that made it possible. The image is less about individual heroics than the material conditions of war. In this way, Fenton's photograph invites us to consider the relationship between technological innovation, labor, and the representation of conflict. It’s a reminder that even the most seemingly objective images are shaped by the materials and processes used to create them.