Was this famous war photo staged?

“I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the two photographs and thinking about the two sentences,” Morris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Sontag know that Fenton altered the landscape or, for that matter, ‘oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself?'” How, for that matter, “did Sontag know the sequence of the photographs? How did she know which photograph came first?”

Roger Fenton’s 1855 photo “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” is the first famous photograph of war, depicting a barren road littered with cannonballs fired during the Crimean War. But there’s a second photo of the same road with no cannonballs, which has led photo historians, and, notably, American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag, to claim that the famed photo is staged. Meaning, the photo with no cannonballs was taken first, and the photo with cannonballs was arranged and taken second.

American documentary film director Errol Morris went down a rabbit hole of interviews and photo analysis to determine if that order of the photos – with cannonballs “OFF” the road first, then “ON” – is accurate, based solely on what’s present in the photographs themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseXTUokd3k&feature=emb_title

This video is part of the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” series, in which the world’s top thinkers, newsmakers, and people with stories to tell are interviewed. For more meditations on photography, give some time to Errol Morris’ speech at the Harvard Bookstore.