Curatorial description (Accessed: 2 December 2015)
Roger Fenton was just beginning to carve out a career as a photographer when he made this enigmatic image of a cottage and shed on the banks of the Dnieper River near Kiev, having been invited by his friend the engineer Charles Blacker Vignoles to record the building of the world's largest suspension bridge. August Fenton left England for Russia with Vignoles, who had engaged John Cooke Bourne in March 1848 as "resident artist" to photograph the Nicholas Bridge (named after Czar Nicholas I). Remarkably, Fenton seems to have had only two days to make photographs - and even the surviving output of seven negatives is an astonishing production given his lack of experience with the time-consuming process of producing photographic prints on paper.
