s I made my way up the narrow spiral staircase, my
lightweight camera bag scraped on one wall, my
elbow on the other. How, I wondered, had
Rochdale photographer Roger Fenton got up here a
century and a half before me with his heavy, woodenbodied
camera, tripod and all the other paraphernalia of
early photography?
There were a few differences between him and me - not
least of them being that I was carrying a compact camera
and a few rolls of film, total weight about three pounds
while his kit probably weighed 40 times that. He was using
the waxed paper negative process and large 8"x6" sheets
of negative paper, while I was using a modern 645 roll film
camera. His camera and its relatively insensitive paper
would require an exposure of several minutes, while mine
needed 1/125th of a second. He was escorted up the
tower by a member of the Tsar's staff. I was accompanied
by a Kremlin official and a heavily armed guard.
But we had things in common, too. He had been invited
up Ivan the Great's bell tower at the edge of Cathedral
Square in the heart of Moscow's Kremlin as an honoured
guest of the Russian government. I too was there as the
guest of the Kremlin authorities, who had given me unique
permission to take my camera up the bell-tower-long
closed to the public for security reasons to recreate
Fenton's iconic photograph of the Cathedral of the
Assumption which he had taken almost exactly 150 years
before me. My escort told me it was probably a hundred
years since anyone other than the Kremlin's official
photographers had taken a camera up to the narrow ledge
from where Fenton had taken his picture in 1852.
I was in Russia to recreate Fenton's two great journeys
to the country - in 1852 visiting St Petersburg, Moscow
and Kiev, and in 1855 as semi-official photographer of the
Crimean War working for Manchester art dealer Thomas
Agnew.
The trip was all part of the research and photography for
my new book Great Photographic Journeys, to be
published this autumn by Stockport-based Dewi Lewis
Publishing, a small publisher with a big name for
producing great photography books. The project was to
be part photographic history, part travelogue, and part
travel history - comparing the experiences of a
traveller/photographer now with pioneers from the 1850s,
60s and 70s, and looking at how travel, cultural relations,
and photography itself have changed over a century and a
half. Five years in the making, the journeys for the book
took me – in addition to Russian and the Ukraine - across
Europe, and to India, China, Cyprus and Egypt. That last
journey, up the Nile from Cairo to Abu Simbel, was in the
footsteps of onetime Liverpool grocery merchant Francis
Frith who later established the huge Frith & Co publishing
empire which claimed to offer for sale pictures of every
town and village in Britain.
Fenton's first journey was part business part pleasure.
The business part was the making of stereoscopic (3D)
photographs of the building of the first permanent bridge
over the River Dnipro at Kiev (Kieff in Fenton's day). Asked
to undertake the trip by the bridge's engineer, Charles
Blacker Vignoles, Fenton was in Kiev in September 1852,
just as the first great chains of the suspension bridge were
raised into position. While the chains themselves were
made by specialist manufacturer Fox Henderson & Co at
their Birmingham foundry, the rest of the ironwork for the
bridge was made at the Globe Foundry of Musgrove &
Sons in Bolton, and much of the stone was quarried in
Lancashire, 3,500 tons of ironwork and an unspecified
tonnage of stone being transported from Liverpool to
Odessa in dozens of shiploads commencing in December
1847. Five years work had been completed by the time
Fenton arrived in Kiev, and little more than a year after he
left, the bridge opened to traffic. By the time I got there,
the bridge was long gone, having been bombed in World
War II, rebuilt, and subsequently replaced with a modern
structure carrying road traffic and the Kiev metro.
In Egypt, I followed in Frith's footsteps up the Nile to the
great temple of Abu Simbel, and after a long overnight
drive across the desert - with armed police escorts in front
and behind (for this is bandit country) I saw the sun rise in
front of the temple, now rebuilt on higher ground to save it
from inundation as the waters of Lake Nasser rose behind
the High Dam. And in Karnak-still half buried in the desert
sand when Frith photographed it in 1857-I jostled with the
thousands of visitors who go there each day, trying to get
my pictures. Frith and his small party of bearers were
alone when they visited the site a century and a half before
me! At the pyramids, just what would Frith have made of
the Pizza Hut and KFC which stand at the entrance?
I made my way from Hong Kong to Beijing, in the
footsteps of Scottish traveller and photographer John
Thomson, and in the middle of the Forbidden City, came
across (and have to admit I welcomed) the sight of a café
in one of the ancient pavilions proudly displaying a sign
saying 'We sell Starbucks Coffee'! How the world has
changed!
Best of all, in the heart of India I discovered to my
horror, after a long day's travel in high temperatures and
debilitating humidity, I had booked a room in a hotel
without a bar. ‘No worry’ said the desk clerk with a
knowing wink, ‘we can send a bottle of 'crushed fruit
drink' to your room if you wish’. I did, indeed wish! ‘Would
you like local or Danish?’ he asked.