Oscar Rejlander (1813 - 1875)

Oscar Gustave Rejlander – the father of art photography

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

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.

Hard Times 1860, Perhaps the first deliberately double-exposed photograph, Oscar Rejlander.   

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.

Child study after Raphael's Sistine Madonna, 1854-1856, Oscar Gustave Rejlander    

Bad Temper, 1865, Oscar Gustave Rejlander

‘Happy Days’ (Rejlander and his wife), 1872, Oscar Gustave Rejlander

‘A night on the streets of London’, 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander 

The Two Ways Of Life, 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander

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. This image is a photomontage analogous to work created in Photoshop today. But waaaaaay more difficult to create. Rejlander seamlessly montaged 32 images using glass plate negatives in a darkroom in about 6 weeks.

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.

‘Reclining female nude artists’ study, dorsal’, 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Double selfportrait, 1872, Oscar Gustave Rejlander

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.

‘Sweet Slumber’,1860, Oscar Gustave Rejlander