RogerFentonThere’s an amazingly long winded Opinion piece by weirdie documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in today’s NYTimes. Morris fixates on a pair of famous photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. The salted paper prints are currently housed in the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin. The entire article hinges on the ostensible staging of two photos in the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.” After reading a presumptuous Susan Sontag reference to these photos, Morris hopped on a plane to Crimea to investigate. The end result is an absurd conversation, with people measuring shadows and counting cannonballs along a roadside ravine in Crimea. I plucked this Fenton photo [circa 1855] from the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs archive, it is entitled “The Sanitary Commission.” *Note the cannonball in the foreground.

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