The Ultimate Spectacle ― A Visual History of the Crimean War

Chloroform, telegraphy, steamships and rifles were distinctly modern features of the Crimean War. Covered by a large corps of reporters, illustrators and cameramen, it also became the first media war in history. For the benefit of the ubiquitous artists and correspondents, both the military and the domestic events were carefully staged, giving the Crimean War an aesthetically alluring, even spectacular character.
With their exclusive focus on written sources, historians have consistently overlooked this visual dimension of the Crimean War. Photo-historian Ulrich Keller challenges the traditional literary bias by drawing on a wealth of pictorial materials from scientific diagrams to photographs, press illustration and academic painting. The result is a new and different historical account which emphasizes the careful aesthetic scripting of the war for popular mass consumption at home. Included in this media history of the Crimean War are elements of its still unwritten social history. In the Victorian era, the proliferation of lithography, press illustration, photography and other mass media, gave various social groups a chance to circulate competing views of the war where, previously, monarchs had possessed a near monopoly on the pictorial representation of history. The broad range of visual sources included in the book thus documents not only the war between the British and the Russians in the Crimea but also the battle of representations which raged in the deeply divided society at home.

Ulrich Keller is Professor of Art History, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.