The first war to be photographed?

[John Kasaian]

Crimea?
Predates our Civil War by seven years.

https://youtu.be/Tr_ZVoS3MrI

[ic-racer]

How did the cannon balls get on the road? (it is a rhetorical question, of course).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Valley_of_the_shadow_of_death.jpg

[John Layton]

Yes...those cannon balls were moved! Photo by Gardner I believe. There is another photo of the same view with many less canon balls. To lazy to find this right now but somebody will I'm sure!

M. Brady (mostly his many minions) did lots of stuff like this...even re-posing of corpses - to create photos which were more "effective."

[Mark Sampson]

It was Roger Fenton who made that picture. Filmmaker Errol Morris has written a long article, trying to decide whether Fenton (and assistant) moved the cannonballs. Many people have opined on the subject... I got tired of the endless discussion (wherever it was posted) so can't summarize it further. I have seen the original print, a few years ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Fenton was a master of the (still very new) medium.

[Cameron Cornell]

Yes...those cannon balls were moved! Photo by Gardner I believe. There is another photo of the same view with many less canon balls. To lazy to find this right now but somebody will I'm sure!

M. Brady (mostly his many minions) did lots of stuff like this...even re-posing of corpses - to create photos which were more "effective."

This is an interesting, in-depth discussion:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/which-came-first-part-three-can-george-lionel-and-marmaduke-help-us-order-the-fenton-photographs/

Cameron Cornell
Washington State

[Jerry Bodine]

M. Brady (mostly his many minions) did lots of stuff like this...even re-posing of corpses - to create photos which were more "effective."

This reminds me of an outing at one of AA's Yosemite workshops. A group of participants was turned loose to find images in a junkyard, led by one of AA's assistants - a painter. One of the young fellas set up his camera and started to remove a soda can from his composition; whereupon he was roundly scolded in front of everyone by the painter "You NEVER rearrange an object from a found composition." I felt sorry for the kid and lost all appreciation for the painter. Who knew this unwritten "rule" existed and was never to be broken? Always wondered if the painter would've included the can in a painting.

[cowanw]

The first photographs of war were made in 1847, when an unknown American photographer produced a series of fifty daguerreotypes depicting scenes from the Mexican-American war in Saltillo, Mexico.
https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/col-hamtramck-virginia-volunteers
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_THEME_War_Mexican_American_01/6/19/89159387218648936977/

[John Kasaian]

The first photographs of war were made in 1847, when an unknown American photographer produced a series of fifty daguerreotypes depicting scenes from the Mexican-American war in Saltillo, Mexico.
https://www.cartermuseum.org/collection/col-hamtramck-virginia-volunteers
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_THEME_War_Mexican_American_01/6/19/89159387218648936977/
Good to know!

[Drew Wiley]

Those cannonballs were probably shot at some wise guy scolding the photographer for removing a can from the foreground. Or at least that would have been a legitimate use for them!

[Mark Sampson]

Thank you Mr. Cornell- that was the discussion I'd referred to. Someday I'll return to it.

[reddesert]

I like attempts at historical deduction, but when that Errol Morris discussion went into the third page of if-this-no-maybe-that, I began to sympathize with Thomas Kuhn, whom Morris claims (no evidence) threw an ashtray at Morris's head, due to an exasperating undergrad philosophical argument.

[Chauncey Walden]

Nah, they were thrown at the Light Brigade for refusing to hold their horses long enough for a Russian photographer to make a shot.