Oscar Gustave Rejlander, ‘the Father of Art Photography’

Fifteen years after Oscar Rejlander’s death in 1875, fellow British photographer Peter Henry Emerson mockingly credited Rejlander with developing the “wrong-headed method” of combination printing. He called for Rejlander’s “manipulative and overly theatrical” process — which involved printing from numerous negatives to create one photograph — to be abandoned. The exhibition Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, which recently traveled to the Getty Center from the National Gallery of Canada, serves to rectify the century of oversight initiated by critics like Emerson. Assembling over 140 works, it covers each phase of Rejlander’s career, from portraitist, to combination printer, to scientific illustrator.

This unprecedented retrospective positions Rejlander as a showman whose romantic and professional partnership with pantomime actress Mary Bull yielded several thriving commercial studios. After emigrating from Sweden to England in 1839 and taking up photography in 1852, he became one of the first to recognize photography’s potential as a “handmaid of art” — exemplified by early photographs like “The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush.” This tiny print served to demonstrate how photography could preserve an allegorical scene for a painter’s extended study. It also functioned as a self-portrait and hinted at Rejlander’s hidden ambitions: reflected in the convex mirror, he presents himself as a modern-day Jan van Eyck.

The exhibition meticulously highlights Rejlander’s many innovations, including the introduction of narrative into photographs. In “The First Negative,” he restages Pliny’s account of the origins of painting, boldly suggesting that the act of tracing a shadow is more akin to creating a photographic negative than a painting. To be sure, Rejlander’s underlying motive involved proving the artistry of his newfound profession. Another novelty involved using combination printing to visualize sitters’ private thoughts within the photographic frame. One spectacular example shows Rejlander posing as a wounded Garibaldi, encouraged in his quest to unite Italy by a mental vision of Rome that appears double-printed in the clouds overhead.

Rejlander’s ambition to elevate photography to the narrative complexity and epic scale of painting reached its apex in 1857, with “Two Ways of Life.” This photograph was created by printing figures from 30 negatives to create a scene that never existed in reality. The complex tableau — shown in two variations within the exhibition — depicts a philosopher guiding a youth as he decides between piousness and depravity. The gallery surrounding Rejlander’s magnum opus illustrates the binary of sacred and profane, with nude figure studies appearing to the right, and religious characters shown to the left. Rejlander modeled “Two Ways of Life” after Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” and considered his own work an artistic masterpiece. Unfortunately, critics did not agree: “Works of high art are not to be executed by a mechanical contrivance,” one rebuked. Others had concerns about the “flesh-and-blood truthfulness” of his photographic nudity. (Despite explanatory labels, contemporary viewers may have trouble understanding just what was so distasteful — either morally or technically — about the photograph.)

Although Rejlander eschewed combination printing following this scandal, other sections of the exhibition make clear that he continued to experiment. He was perhaps the first to market photographic nude studies to artists, and he even used them to test the anatomical accuracy of the Old Masters. His photograph “Ariadne” was created, in part, to expose the unnatural pose and elongated feminine proportions in Titian’s “Venus and Adonis.” Many of Rejlander’s contemporaries came to rely on these nude studies, and the exhibition contains at least three originally owned by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.

While Rejlander’s photographs may occasionally appear overly sentimental or moralizing to contemporary viewers, they contain traces of a radical methodology. Not content to accept the limits of the medium, Rejlander continually pushed its technical boundaries to suffuse photography with an undeniable artistry. Even after controversy, he maintained a strikingly conceptual approach, writing, “It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials which makes his production a work of art.” One comes away from the exhibition feeling somewhat incredulous that Rejlander has not achieved the same recognition as his apprentice, Julia Margaret Cameron, or fellow combination printer, Gustave Le Gray. Our present digital age may represent the ideal moment, then, to revisit the work of this pioneer (now known as the “Grandfather of Photoshop”), whose so-called “mechanical contrivances” were met with considerable skepticism during their own time.

The Overlooked Legacy of Oscar Rejlander, Who Elevated Photography to an Art. By Dana Ostrander. Hyperallergic , April 2 , 2019. 

Very little is known about Rejlander’s early life. In his obituary The Photographic News wrote:

Of the early life of Mr. Rejlander, we have but a brief record, derived from his incidental remarks in conversation.

Even the fact that he was born in 1813 is conjecture—deduced from the age written on his death certificate.

A flamboyant, colourful, theatrical figure, Rejlander may well have actively cultivated a sense of mystery surrounding his origins.

Probably born in Sweden (again, this is not certain) as a young man, Rejlander studied painting, and later moved to Rome where he made a living making copies of Renaissance paintings.

It was perhaps as a result of his early experience as a painter that Rejlander realised how useful photography could be to artists. He himself claimed that this moment of revelation came in 1852 after he’d bought some photographic reproductions of classical sculptures and was captivated by how photography succeeded in capturing the complicated folds of drapery.

The precise date that Rejlander arrived in Britain isn’t known, but during the early 1840s he was living in Lincoln and working as a portrait painter, before settling in Wolverhampton in 1846.

In 1852 Rejlander took up photography. He later claimed that he was almost entirely self-taught, his instruction being confined to a single afternoon’s tuition from Nicholaas Henneman, William Henry Fox Talbot’s former valet and assistant. However, given the complexity of the wet-plate process which Rejlander used, this claim seems somewhat unlikely.

Rejlander’s choice of photographic subject matter was clearly influenced by the works of art he’d studied as a young man. He favoured sentimental genre studies, narrative tableaux and portraits with a strong theatrical or emotional element. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was also prepared to reveal a sense of humour in his work.

Rejlander pioneered the painstaking technique of combination printing—combining several different negatives to create a single final image. In 1857 he used this technique to produce his best-known photograph, an allegorical tableau entitled The Two Ways of Life, created using over 30 separate negatives.

This work was extremely controversial at the time since it included a number of nude figures. However, Queen Victoria clearly was impressed since she bought a copy as a gift for her beloved Albert after seeing it exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition.

In 1862 Rejlander moved to London.

In 1871, impressed by the naturalness of his photographic portraits, Charles Darwin commissioned Rejlander to provide the illustrations for his book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Despite being very ill with diabetes, Rejlander threw himself into the task with great enthusiasm, even posing himself for several of the studies.

In 1875, despite a long and prolific career, Rejlander died in poverty.

Following his death, 140 of Rejlander’s prints and 60 of his wet collodion glass negatives were acquired from his widow by the Royal Photographic Society.

At a ceremony held in November last year, Rejlander’s previously unmarked grave in Kensal Green cemetery had a new commemorative stone placed on it, funded by donations from Wolverhampton Photographic Society.

Rejlander was convinced that photographs could not only be a useful tool for artists but also an art form in their own right and he aspired to raise photography to the status of art.

The verdict of the Art Journal on his work would have delighted him:

Late years have shown that more can be done than we at one time thought possible, and that results are obtainable from lens and camera, which are not merely imitations and copies from still nature, but productions of mind and thoughtful study, and which, when gazed on, raise emotions and feelings similar to those awakened at the sight of some noble sepia sketch, the handiwork of a good draughtsman. Of Mr. Rejlander’s pictures (for such we may justly call them) we have no hesitation in saying that they are full of beauty and full of mind.

Introducing Oscar Gustave Rejlander, the father of art photography. By Colin Harding. Science and Mediamuseum , July 1, 2013.

 The National Portrait Gallery has acquired a rare album of images by a Victorian artist considered the “father of art photography”.

Oscar Gustav Rejlander is recognised as a true pioneer whose narrative portraits often had a strong theatrical or emotional element. He is known for combining multiple negatives in the darkroom to create artful, artificial compositions, long before Photoshop was around.

Last year, the government placed an export bar on the album after it was sold to a Canadian buyer at auction; it had previously been in the possession of the same family for 140 years.

However on Monday the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) announced that it had been successful in raising the necessary £74,651.

Phillip Prodger, the gallery’s head of photographs, said the Rejlander album would become “one of the jewels in the crown of our already impressive collection of 19th-century photographs”. He added: “It transforms the way we think about one of Britain’s great artists and it contains some of the most beautiful and expressive portraits of the Victorian era.”

 

The album contains an unseen Rejlander self-portrait and another of the photographer tugging thoughtfully on his beard as his wife, Mary, rests her head on his shoulder.

There are also photographs of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s son Lionel Tennyson and the poet and essayist Sir Henry Taylor.

Rejlander, a colourful, theatrical figure, was born in Sweden, studied in Rome and made his way in about 1846 to Wolverhampton, where he opened a photographic studio.

In 1862 he moved to London and established a reputation as one of Britain’s leading photographers with a range that included portraits, landscapes, nudes and anatomical studies.

He influenced photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Luwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and collaborated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Charles Darwin, who commissioned Rejlander to provide the illustrations for his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

The NPG said the album, put together to showcase Rejlander’s portrait work, was “one of the most significant 19th-century British photographic objects to have come to light in recent decades”.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the NPG, said: “We are delighted to welcome this album into the gallery’s collection, not least because it will provide access to important examples of portraiture from the history of photography. We also hope it will enable visitors to engage with Victorian photography in a new way and make comparisons with later developments.”

The album had been owned by Surgeon Commander Herbert Ackland Browning and then passed through the family. It was bought with money that included a £26,862 grant from the Art Fund. A further £35,153 came from the gallery’s own resources and £12,600 from individual gallery supporters.

Gallery buys rare album by Victorian photographic pioneer.  By Mark Brown.   The Guardian,  May  9, 2016.