Name: Was this famous war photo staged? feat. Errol Morris
Uploaded: 2020-11-18T18:05:10.000Z
Duration: 8 min 28 s
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This is the first famous photograph of war.

Basic passive voice

It's called “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” and it was taken by British photographer

During the first war to be photographed: the Crimean War.

A bloody and confusing three-year conflict fought between Russia and an alliance of the

Ottoman Empire, United Kingdom, France, and Sardinia.

The photo is part of a large collection taken by Fenton.

Who was sent to Crimea – a peninsula on the Black Sea in Eastern Europe – to bring

Most of the images depict camp life and portraits of soldiers.

But because out of the hundreds of photos Fenton took while he was in Crimea...

The two photos are almost identical – they show the same devastated landscape,

from the same tripod position, but with one key difference.

The one that became famous shows cannonballs scattered on the road.

Did Fenton clear the cannonballs from the road?

Or did he put them there himself, as photo historians have alleged?

ERROL MORRIS: The fact that there's a pair, by the way, is mysterious in and of itself.

Oscar-winning documentary director and collector of… unique taxidermy.

Who went down a rabbit hole of research, a trip across the world, and painstaking photo

MORRIS: That became the mystery of this pair of photographs.

Morris' journey to find the answer – which he chronicled in a three-part essay in the

New York Times – started with an accusation.

MORRIS: I first read about them in an essay by Susan Sontag.

Sontag, an American writer and filmmaker, argued that the famous photo was manipulated

That he photographed the scene as he found it, then “oversaw the scattering of cannonballs

on the road” to stage the second image.

For simplicity, Morris refers to these photos as “ON” and “OFF.”

MORRIS: And so the argument is that “ON” is posed.

MORRIS: And he put them on the road in order to create a more dramatic image.

MORRIS: But there should be some kind of evidence independent of conjectures about Fenton's

MORRIS: How from the photographs themselves and from contemporaneous accounts can I decide

Fenton, in a letter to his wife, says that he took “2 good pictures” in the Valley

But there's no mention of which came first, or what happened in the span of time between

Five interviews with photo historians and museum curators with expert knowledge on Fenton

left Morris with contradictory conclusions about which photo makes more sense to have

And whether or not Fenton wanted to add drama to the scene.

MORRIS: Well, maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. That doesn't tell me which photograph was

MORRIS: Which comes first, “ON” or “OFF”, “OFF” or “ON?”

The answer would have to come from somewhere within the photos themselves.

MORRIS: At first I thought that the shadows…

Maybe if he could better understand the positions of the shadows around objects in the photos,

Morris could determine which one was taken later in the day.

So, naturally, he flew to the Crimean peninsula.

And with the help of a local guide, trekked to the exact spot in the Valley of the Shadow

of Death where Fenton had stood 150 years earlier.

MORRIS: I actually got a cannonball, and placed the cannonball, photographed it at various

MORRIS: Hoping the shadows would provide the ultimate clue as to before and after.

And what did you determine? I mean, you had the ball in your hand, you photographed it,

you knew which way he was facing. Did that help?

MORRIS: I could not reliably decide which came first.

There's just too many variables in the chemical processes required to take photos back then

to make a reliable guess about what the lighting conditions were.

MORRIS: Going to the Crimea, getting a cannonball, finding the actual place in which these photographs

Morris was right about one thing from the beginning though: the solution to which of

these photos was taken first is in the photographs themselves.

Obsessing over the cannonballs made sense, but the solution isn't here.

It's here. A friend of Morris's spotted it.

These rocks moved, and that revealed something about what happened in the time between the

MORRIS: If people are walking in this scene, gravity is going to pull them from a higher

MORRIS: And by observing the motion of these rocks. We can decide which came first.

These rocks determined that ON — the one with the cannonballs in the road — was,

MORRIS: Without even looking at the cannonballs. How irritating!

The photo we now know to be taken second was displayed in London in 1855, along with Fenton's

Press reviews of the exhibit celebrated the new medium of photography, and praised its

They singled out The Valley of the Shadow of Death as a must-see.

One reviewer said the photo, which is “literally covered with projectiles” showed with “terrible

distinctness” what British soldiers had “dared and encountered.”

MORRIS: The relationship between a photograph and reality is complicated.

After months of investigation, interviews, and dead ends, Morris definitively figured

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