A little over a century ago, England and France united for the first time to defend the Ottoman Empire—the Sublime Porte—against the Russian assault. From the crossing of the Black Sea to the interminable siege of Sevastopol, the Crimean War was a conflict as deadly as it was futile, one that altered neither borders nor military strategy. Yet it left behind a lasting trace: a profusion of images—English engravings, French lithographs, Russian prints, caricatures, paintings, and sketches—where the sublime meets the grotesque, and heroism mingles with mockery.
And then came the first photographers, pitiless witnesses to the realities of the battlefield. Far from myth, their images revealed hunger, epidemics, and death—forces that claimed more soldiers than enemy bullets. Photography had entered the war, and with it, truth began to stand against the illusions of art.