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his memorial poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Fenton’s memorial photograph is a portrait of absence, of death without the dead. It is the only photograph he took that would not have needed to be staged, for all it shows is a wide rutted road studded with rocks and cannonballs that curves onward across a barren rolling plain to the distant void.
    A bolder portfolio of after-the-battle images of death and ruin, pointing not to losses suffered but to a fearsome exaction of British military might, was made by another photographer who had visited the Crimean War. Felice Beato, a naturalized Englishman (he was born in Venice), was the first photographer to attend a number of wars: besides being in the Crimea in 1855, he was at the Sepoy Rebellion (what the British call the Indian Mutiny) in 1857–58, the Second Opium War in China in 1860, and the Sudanese colonial wars in 1885. Three years after Fenton made his anodyne images of a war that did not go well for England, Beato was celebrating the fierce victory of the British army over a mutiny of native soldiers under its command, the first important challenge to British rule in India. The arresting photograph Beato took in Lucknow of the Sikandarbagh Palace, gutted by the British bombardment, shows the courtyard strewn with rebels’ bones.
    The first full-scale attempt to document a war was carried out a few years later, during the American Civil War, by a firm of Northern photographers headed by Mathew Brady, who had made several official portraits of President Lincoln. The Brady war pictures—most were taken by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, though their employer was invariably credited with them—showed conventional subjects such as encampments populated by officers and foot soldiers, towns in war’s way, ordnance, ships, as well as, most famously, dead Union and Confederate soldiers lying on the blasted ground of Gettysburg and Antietam. Though access to the battlefield came as a privilege extended to Brady and his team by Lincoln himself, the photographers were not commissioned as Fenton had been. Their status evolved in a more American fashion, with nominal government sponsorship giving way to the force of entrepreneurial and freelance motives.
    The first justification for the brutally legible pictures of dead soldiers, which clearly violated a taboo, was the simple duty to record. “The camera is the eye of history,” Brady is supposed to have said. And history, invoked as a truth beyond appeal, was allied with the rising prestige of a certain idea of subjects needing further attention known as realism—soon to have more defenders among novelists than among photographers. 1 In the name of realism, one was permitted—required—to show unpleasant, hard facts. Such pictures also convey “a useful moral” by showing “the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry,” Gardner wrote in the text accompanying O’Sullivan’s picture of fallen Confederate soldiers, their agonized faces turned to the viewer, in the album of pictures by him and other Brady photographers that he published after the war. (Gardner left Brady’s employ in 1863.) “Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity from falling upon the nation.” But the frankness of the most memorable pictures in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) did not mean that he and his colleagues had necessarily photographed their subjects as they found them. To photograph was to compose (with living subjects, to pose), and the desire to arrange elements in the picture did not vanish because the subject was immobilized, or immobile.
    Not surprisingly, many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much-shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: