Roger Fenton’s Balls
Pigment prints from archival image on baryta paper, 2026
Roger Fenton’s Valley of the Shadow of Death is one of the earliest canonical images in the history of war photography. Made during the Crimean War, the photograph shows a barren, rocky valley cut by a road and a ditch, both strewn with cannonballs. The image has long been subject to controversy due to the existence of another version of the same scene in which the road contains far fewer cannonballs, suggesting that the more famous image may have been arranged for the camera.
Using a Library of Congress scan of the photographic print, I remove, multiply, and rearrange the cannonballs while leaving the archival object intact. The intervention treats the cannonball as the basic unit of photographic uncertainty. If Fenton’s photograph is already haunted by the possibility of staging, these images make that suspicion explicit. The absurdity of the gesture is repeated until the authority of the original is lost in the various iterations of the image.
Only one image remains unaltered.
