London's Tate Gallery used to be famous for its perverse refusal to collect or exhibit photography. Photography could only darken its doors as an auxiliary medium. For conceptual or performance art, photography was an acceptable record. It could sometimes offer evidence of the early thinking of artists who would then be shown in something more respectable, like paint.
All that has changed, probably in a deliberate attempt to stake a position in the shifting balance of power as Britain's photographic institutions finally edge painfully towards sorting themselves out. There are new photographic museums afoot in Britain (not a moment too soon) and Tate wants a piece of the action. Its record on photography has been dreadful. Now it is performing a spectacular volte-face. Tate Modern made a big hoo-ha late in 2003 about its show Cruel and Tender, on 20th century documentary, and now it is the turn of Tate Britain, with a spectacular exhibition on the high Victorian photographer Roger Fenton.
Tate probably does not have the expertise to put on such a show any more than it did for Cruel and Tender, which was imported from Germany. It is questionable how much it could update the excellent 1988 Fenton exhibition at the Hayward if it did. So it is our good fortune that Fenton is less known in America than in the UK, allowing Tate to act as the UK host for a monumental curatorial effort by three great American institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington have apparently never acted in concert together. Perhaps they will again, because this exhibition is a palpable hit.
The point is not to revolutionise our view of Fenton, whose work and career are tolerably well known. Instead this show wraps up by diligent and meticulous scholarship the best of what is known and presents a fully rounded profile of a Victorian artist.
In the course of doing that, it springs a couple of surprises.
I had never seen Fenton's amazingly modern image called "The Queen's Target", of 1860. It is literally that, a close view of the target shot by Queen Victoria at the inaugural meeting of the National Rifle Association. Her Majesty's shot was rigged so that she could not miss, but Fenton's was not. By omitting any background at all and simply presenting a dark circle on the lighter ground of the wooden support behind it, Fenton invites us to look at surface and material in a way that was not common until 50 years later. It could easily be a detail of one of the weatherboarded shacks in Walker Evans or some Bauhaus exercise in deliberate abstraction. In the context of this exhibition it becomes impossible to wonder whether Fenton quite knew what he was doing when he made it. He most certainly did.
Fenton was an unusually deliberate photographer. Not for him the happy photographic accidents that make up so much of the interest of others' work. In his landscape work even the outer branches of trees remain quite remarkably still (particularly so given the necessarily long exposures of the 1850s when Fenton worked).
He had trained as a painter, and was an early campaigner for photography to be taken seriously. On both those counts, when he offers us a detail to see, he offers it for a reason. Again and again in this exhibition we find ourselves noticing not the odd thing that had escaped his control, but the range of detail that was within it. Fenton did not leave much to chance.
So in his famous "Valley of the Shadow of Death", from the Crimea, where a shallow declivity in the ground is peppered with cannon balls. They are so dense that nothing could possibly have survived the murderous rain as they fell. I wondered whether Fenton did not recruit an under-employed platoon to roll the cannon balls close to the camera. They are suspiciously fewer in the distance. It remains a wonderful picture, one of the very few to manage to describe the utter gory carnage of war by allusion alone, with not a single butcher's detail.
Only Fenton's portraits lack conviction, to my eye, the portraits of a man who could never quite get a sitter to give himself over entirely to the photographer.
In all the rest there is about Fenton a self-assurance and an assurance in his medium that are simply a delight to see again. The world just seemed to fall into place for Fenton to show it as he wanted it to be seen.
When he photographs "Ely Cathedral" (1857) he quite deliberately uses nondescript trees to break the bulky building into two separated masses. By doing so he makes it look more like a pagoda complex and less like a masterpiece of the gothic. The trees are relatively dark and the cathedral actively radiates light. It outshines the best from the "Mission Héliographique" in France (by such photographers as Le Secq or Baldus) of the same period.
Fenton's view of the new houses of Parliament, still in scaffolding, is marvellous, too. It is a great picture, the new building seen in a partnership of church and state with Westminster Abbey. The two loom over a much lower-built London than we see now, as the Abbey alone did in Hollar's engraved views in the 17th century. Fenton used the great curve of the chains of Brunel's suspended Hungerford Bridge to underline the partnership between the two buildings, and it was well-chosen to be on the cover of thecatalogue.
The catalogue, incidentally, is fully worthy of the show. At a time when museums so easily get themselves in a twist about what they are there to do, it is very nice to see the old virtues of great scholarship applied to a subject wholly worthy of the effort. This is a lovely, solid show of a lovely, solid photographer.
Roger Fenton at Tate Britain, London, until January 2 2006.
Tel 020 7887 8000
Sponsored by The HiteFoundation.
