The mighty world of Roger Fenton.

• Position: Focus on Photography - All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860

THE MOST CELEBRATED and influential photographer in England during the medium's "golden age" of the 1850s is the subject of the exhibition "All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860." It brings together 90 of the artist's most compelling and best preserved works. Together they reveal Fenton (1819-1869) as a towering figure in the history of photography and an unparalleled master of all the young medium's genres--architecture, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau-vivant.

Fenton was influenced profoundly by the great English Romantic painters and poets of the early 19th century. The exhibition takes its title from William Wordsworth's Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, an ode to nature in which the author declares himself "A lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they haft-create / And what perceive."

"The poet's words find an echo in the reverence for nature so evident in Fenton's landscapes, and, even more aptly, they suggest the photographer's grand ambition and broad reach," notes Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. "In the course of a single decade, Fenton produced majestic architectural views of England's ruined abbeys and her stately homes, Romantic depictions of the countryside, moving reportage of the Crimean War, intimate portraits of Queen Victoria and her family, enchanting Orientalist tableaux, and astonishingly lush still lifes."

Before taking up the camera, Fenton studied law in London and painting in Pads. He traveled to Russia in 1852 and photographed the landmarks of Kiev and Moscow; founded the Photographic Society (later designated the Royal Photographic Society) in 1853; and was appointed the first official photographer of the British Museum in 1854. Fenton achieved widespread recognition for his photographs of the Crimean War in 1855, including portraits of confident commanders and shell-shocked soldiers, scenes of Balaklava Harbor and of the allied camps, and views of the terrain of battle. Among the most understated but moving of these is "Valley of the Shadow of Death," a barren landscape littered with cannonballs.

Fenton's greatest artistic achievement, however, came in the realms of landscape and architectural photography. He traveled extensively throughout England, Wales, and Scotland, photographing...