He complains about the potholes in the road in response I mention the gigantic potholes in Kiev, large enough to swallow entire vehicles, as photographed by Boris Mikhailov. Costa turns on the air conditioner and the radio and we are off. We load my luggage and camera equipment into the back of a sedan. The driver, who is the spitting image of Sylvester Stallone, introduces himself as Costa and, in broken English, apologizes profusely for being late. Friday June 3, 2011Īmidst the crowd outside the Simferopol Airport secure area, I finally spot, much to my relief, a sign bearing my name. Curiously, today these chemical veils (as evident in Fenton’s portrait of war artist William Simpson) convey the sense of war more effectively than Victorian censorship and propriety could ever have done, in as much as the campaign was tragically botched with much unnecessary loss of life. Roger Fenton was also not immune to technical difficulties, which affected numerous of his negatives, like some mysterious force come to wreak havoc across his landscape views or the faces of his sitters. At the beginning of 1855, Roger Fenton was sent to Crimea by the British government, in part to correct the efforts of Brandon and Dawson, as well as to counter increasing criticism of the campaign. The pair arrived in London with stacks of essentially worthless monochromatic glass-plates, displaying only the faint traces of their recordings. On the return journey, as a consequence of the negatives having been inadequately fixed, the images that Brandon and Dawson had obtained began to gradually disappear. The initial incentive stemmed from research concerning two military officers, British ensigns Brandon and Dawson, commissioned by the War Office in 1854 to document the Crimean War when Britain and France came to the Ottoman Empire’s defense against Russia. The dated entries that follow are excerpted from a journal I kept last summer when I travelled to Crimea in Ukraine in order to execute a photo project about, among other things, the appearance of the past within the present and the fate of certain images.

The fate of the furious 123