Detail View: The AMICA Library: The Miners' Bridge, on the Llugwy, North Wales

AMICA ID: 
CMA_.1990.33
AMICA Library Year: 
1998
Object Type: 
Photographs
Creator Name: 
Fenton, Roger
Creator Nationality: 
European; British
Creator Role: 
artist
Creator Dates/Places: 
1819 - 1869
Biography: 
Roger Fenton British, 1819-1869Despite the relative brevity of his career, Roger Fenton stands among the most important and accomplished British photographers. Born in Heywood, Lancashire, to a wealthy family, Fenton graduated from University College in London and in 1844 may have studied painting in the Paris studio of Paul Delaroche, along with several other important future photographers. After returning to England, he spent four years earning a degree as a solicitor, continued to paint, and developedan interest in photography before joining a London law firm in 1851. Fenton's paintings were shown annually in London at the Royal Academy from 1849?51. After helping to found the Calotype Club (1847), in 1852 he published an article that advocated establishment of a British photographic organization modeled after the Société héliographique in France. His argument, combined with the lifting of the use restrictions on William Henry Fox Talbot's patent for the calotype, led to formation of the London Photographic Society; Fenton served as its first honorary secretary. In December 1852, an early exhibition of the new society included 39 of his views. Soon afterward, he accompanied his friend Charles Vignoles to Russia to photograph the construction of a bridge at Kiev. Traveling to the Crimea in 1855, Fenton was the first photographer to make a sustained sequence of war views. He also accepted commissions to document the collections of the British Museum and to photograph the royal family at Buckingham and Windsor castles. Among Fenton's best work are his photographs of landscapes and architecture. His still lifes are exceptional. His views -- whether of great expanses of garden and lawn, of Balaklava, or of fishermen at a local stream -- have an artistic consistency, grandeur of vision, and command of technique comparable only to the work of Édouard Baldus in France and Carleton E. Watkins in America. In 1862, judging the quality of photography to have declined, Fenton sold all his equipment at auction andreturned to the law. His negatives were bought by Francis Frith, whose publishing concern continued to print them in various formats for the next hundred years. T.W.F.
Gender: 
M
Creator Birth Place: 
Heywood, Lancashire, England
Creator Death Place: 
London, England
Creator Name-CRT: 
Roger Fenton
Title: 
The Miners' Bridge, on the Llugwy, North Wales
Title Type: 
Primary
View: 
Full View
Creation Date: 
1857
Creation Start Date: 
1857
Creation End Date: 
1857
Materials and Techniques: 
albumen print from wet collodion negative
Classification Term: 
Photography
Dimensions: 
Image: 36.7cm x 42.9cm
AMICA Contributor: 
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Owner Location: 
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
ID Number: 
1990.33
Credit Line: 
Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund
Inscriptions: 
Written in pencil on verso: "BOB MINERS"
Rights: 
Context: 
Roger Fenton was a versatile and prolific artist who abruptly ended his brief, twelve-year career as a professional photographer to return to the practice of law. Nevertheless, his architectural and landscape photographs have brought him recognition as the greatest British photographer of the 1850s. In this picturesque scene, Fenton focused on a single figure ascending a precarious wooden bridge that hangs suspended between two craggy surfaces. He often included people in his photographs to indicate scale and to enlived the composition. Fenton's wet collodion negative rendered the texture of the riverbed in minute detail, transforming the dark tones of the rocks and the random pattern of the light-colored lichens into a lively, abstract design. The slow speed of the negative, relative to the swift movement of the stream, turned the rushing water into a dense, white cloud.
Related Image Identifier Link: 
CMA_.1990.33.tif