Glyn-Lledr 1859

Roger Fenton took this photograph, Glyn-Lledr, in the United Kingdom sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. It's part of a larger book of landscape photography. In its time, photography wasn't yet seen as art. It had the status of a new technology. Photography was very important for the way the British Empire recorded the world. This image seems to be connected to the Victorian project of understanding and classifying the landscape. The Victorians loved to arrange and order nature. They were obsessed with geography and the classification of nature. Fenton's image shows a romantic view of nature. It reflects the Victorian cultural obsession with landscape and the project of cataloging the empire. When we study images like this, we can look at popular publications and official records. This gives us insight into the cultural values that were current when the photograph was created. The meaning of art changes with the social and institutional context in which it is viewed.