An eye for detail ahead of its time

Victorian photographer Roger Fenton, the subject of an outstanding retrospective at the Getty, was not an especially flamboyant figure. The grandson of a wealthy Manchester, England, industrialist, he was trained first in law, then in an academic vein of painting and, like many photographers of his generation, cultivated an air of serious artistry so as to establish the respectability of his medium in the eyes of a bourgeois audience.

A curious flair, however, emerges in the show’s three self-portraits. In the first, dated 1852, the then 32-year-old artist appears in a waistcoat emblazoned with fluted diagonal stripes and a print motif vaguely resembling shooting stars, holding a book and a pair of scholarly spectacles with thespian poise. The second, from 1854, portrays Fenton wearing no fewer than three varieties of stripe -- thick, vertical, and muted on the slacks; thinner, diagonal, and satiny on the waistcoat; thinner still and recklessly skewed on the softly knotted cravat -- alongside a sharply contrasting floral print tablecloth. The third, taken in the Crimea a year later, finds Fenton in the borrowed uniform of a French Zouave soldier, sporting a full beard, a tasseled fez, exotically ballooning trousers and a 4-foot rifle, seated with a tyrannical air on the sheepskin coat of a captured Russian officer.

Such theatricality was characteristic of Victorian culture and isn’t especially notable in itself: Oscar Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, and Julia Margaret Cameron were guilty of far worse. The striking thing -- the flair -- is Fenton’s keen, almost giddy attention to the tactile aspects of this theatricality. He’s not photographing a Zouave uniform so much as sheepskin, voluminous fabric and a narrow tube of dulled metal; he’s less interested in presenting himself as an individual than in portraying his crazy cacophony of stripes, the contrast of silky and matte textiles, and the delicate glisten of a gold watch chain.

This focus on contrasting patterns and textures is a subtle but defining thread through Fenton’s entire oeuvre. His subjects -- the Crimean war, the royal family, the Welsh countryside, sacred architecture, and the artifacts of the British Museum, to name a few -- are staid in themselves but spring to life in his exquisitely intricate prints.

If Fenton’s painterly background attuned him to the interplay of contrasts in nature, his genius -- undoubtedly more evident now, in the wake of Modernism, than it could have been in his own time -- lies in his instinct for the way in which these contrasts play out photographically, on the surface of the print.

The effect is pronounced in a spectacular collection of still lifes produced in 1859 and 1860. Among the least familiar works in the exhibition and not, perhaps, the most exciting to a contemporary audience long out of touch with the painterly tradition they appropriate, they are nonetheless stunningly virtuosic, encapsulating within each frame a delirious melange of tones and textures.

Clusters of dark, fat, round grapes drape across the sharp, pale slats of a wicker basket, beneath a cloud of tiny flower blossoms. The saw-toothed leaf of a pineapple curls around the glossy neck of a crystal decanter. Smooth, chalky plums, dimpled strawberries, and taut, glistening currents spill across a swath of fringed, white lace. Fur and feathers mingle in an incoherent pile of dead fowl and game, set off against a cluster of jagged straw.

Fenton’s taste for pattern dominates a similarly opulent series of staged, Orientalist tableaux from 1858 produced not in the Near East, where Fenton never traveled, but in a London studio with British models, most of them friends. With the exception of one frequently appearing woman whose dark, candid gaze cuts through the relative silliness of the enterprise, the figures are of secondary importance to the textiles, vessels, pipes, instruments and other lavish objects that surround them.

The beauty of Fenton’s landscapes and architectural views is so close to perfect that these works, though making up most of the exhibition, become the easiest to overlook. Like the still lifes, they’re rooted in a tradition that carries little currency today and doesn’t catch the contemporary eye as aggressively as those images leaning, however inadvertently, toward Modernism.

The one truly spectacular aspect of this work is Fenton’s treatment of water. In its still form -- in ponds, lakes, bays -- it’s smooth and unnaturally glassy and gathers the surrounding landscape into strange, lush reflections. In streams and creeks, given Fenton’s relatively long exposure time, it melds into a soft, almost ethereal blur that gives several images the peculiar impression of having been digitally composed.

The most exciting images, however, are those in which Fenton abandons painterly conventions, revealing inconsistencies and rough edges of his subjects, and touching on something intrinsically photographic.

One of the best examples is his most famous image, “Valley of the Shadow of Death” from 1855, which portrays a barren plain littered with cannon balls. Surely it ranks among the most stunning war photographs in history. Although much of Fenton’s work in the Crimea echoes the conventions of history painting and conforms to popular notions of heroism, there are moments -- as in this image or the elegiac “Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards,” a portrait of a man who’s clearly seen enough of death -- when one can sense the true horror of the situation creeping in around the edges.

In other cases, Fenton’s departure from convention results in near-abstractions of a strikingly poetic character. One of the British Museum works portrays the skeleton of a prehistoric, ostrich-like bird but, curiously, leaves the ratty edges of the back cloth and portions of a brick wall visible behind. In one of the loveliest landscapes, “The Long Walk,” a narrow road cuts an elegant T into an open lawn and extends straight back to a vanishing point at the center of the horizon line, with bulbous trees hemming in at a respectful distance, like crowds watching an invisible procession.

One of the most startlingly beautiful photographs in the show, “The Queen’s Target,” portrays a flat, black circle which has been painted neatly on a wall of battered wooden planks and pocked by one dainty hole just above the bull’s eye. Though made in 1860, the image could easily be mistaken for a Walker Evans or Charles Sheeler photograph made 70 years later.

Fenton’s photographic career was puzzlingly short: He retired abruptly in 1862, just more than a decade after he began, returned to his law practice and died of “nervous exhaustion, weakness of the heart, and congestion of the lungs” six years later. It was a prolific and exceptionally industrious decade, however, during which Fenton became the first war photographer, personal photographer to Victoria and Albert, and the official photographer of the British Museum; he photographed landscapes across Great Britain and monuments throughout Russia; he co-founded the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), participated in countless exhibitions, and published numerous articles. It was a pivotal decade in photography, during which the fledgling medium found its footing among the traditional arts. Fenton’s contribution to that process is inestimable. It isn’t clear why he gave it up in the end, but he left a remarkable legacy.

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‘All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852--1860’

Where: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays

Ends: April 24

Price: Free; parking, $7

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu