Paul Seawright and Roger Fenton

Paul Seawright - Hidden

Roger Fenton - Valley of the Shadow of Death

Exploring contemporary photography is a key part in understanding what is going on in the media and what ideas artists and photographers are exploring at the current time. One photographer, Paul Seawright, was commissioned by the imperial war museum to photograph scenes from the Afghanistan war in 2002. This project looks at the way that most of the devastating effects of the war are hidden behind the scenes in minefields and battle sights caused by bombs and mines. In the image above, Seawright photographs a trail of empty bomb shells. He composes the image to show a train of a path leading into empty space, leaving it unknown to the viewer what is going on at the end of the path, leaving us feeling uneasy and going towards a place we most probably don't want to explore considering the bombs laid out on the track ahead. This photograph plays homage to a very famous image taken in 1855 by Roger Fenton of which he shoots in the Crimean war, a desolate landscape full of scattered cannonballs. It conveys a strong sense of emotion due to the idea that at first we may only assume that they are rocks on a road to later discover they are cannon balls that can resemble the lives that have been taken in the battlefield. This ismahe is extremely powerful in that it managed to