The Smolnoi Monastery

1851

The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park: discovering photography

Fenton visits the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and is impressed by the photography on display; the new technique grips him so keenly that within a year he begins exhibiting his own photographs.

c. 1851 – 1852

To Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype

Fenton travels to Paris to learn the waxed paper calotype process, most likely from Gustave Le Gray, who had modified the methods of its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot.

c. 1852

Photographing Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg

Fenton travels to photograph Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg, and also photographs views and architecture around Britain.

1852

A manifesto for a Photographic Society

Together with the commercial photographer Antoine Claudet, Fenton publishes a manifesto, “Proposal for the Formation of a Photographic Society”.

1853

Founding the London Photographic Society

Fenton becomes a founder and first secretary of the London Photographic Society, later the Royal Photographic Society under the patronage of Prince Albert.

1854

Commissioned to document the Crimean War

Probably in autumn 1854, powerful friends and patrons — among them Prince Albert and the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War — urge Fenton to go to the Crimea; the London print publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons becomes his commercial sponsor. The photographs may have been meant to offset the war's unpopularity and to counter the critical reporting of William Howard Russell of The Times: they were to be converted into woodblocks for the less critical Illustrated London News.