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This is why I love Errol Morris.

It’s a three part essay written for the New York Times in which Errol Morris tries to figure out (through fact alone) the order in which two Robert Fenton photograhs were taken. The photographs in question are 150 years old, taken from the same angle a couple of hours apart during the Crimean War. The inspiration for this project came about after Morris read two sentences in Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others.

Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, [Roger] Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”(despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.

The photographs in question:

A quote from the essay:

It is insane, but I would like to make the claim that the meaning of photography is contained in these two images. By thinking about the Fenton photographs we are essentially thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography — about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence — about the relationship between photographs and reality.

It’s a fascinating read.