Oscar Rejlander

In the 1850s, Building a Painter’s Composition from Photographic Parts

Rejlander had studied painting and began working seriously with photography in Britain in the early 1850s. The Science Museum Group explains that he initially used photography as an aid to painting^*5. His move toward large-scale combination printing was not simply an attempt to make photographs look like paintings. Long exposures made it difficult to hold many people in the same expression and pose at once or to light every figure as desired. By photographing figures and backgrounds separately, he could control pose and scale one person at a time, reshoot failed sections, and combine the elements only at the end. To carry a painter’s approach to composition into the technical limits of photography, he had to treat negatives as components rather than finished pictures.

A central question around art photography at the time was whether an image produced mechanically could be treated as art on the same terms as painting and sculpture. Rejlander answered through construction: instead of relying on painterly softness, he used multiple photographic negatives as material for a large composed picture. Getty’s retrospective reassesses his career across painting, printmaking, portraiture, and photography rather than through combination printing alone^*1.

The Two Ways of Life — Making One Photograph from More Than Thirty Negatives

The Two Ways of Life is an allegory in which two young men guided by a sage diverge toward paths of “vice” and “virtue.” Rejlander built the final image from more than thirty negatives of separately photographed figures and backgrounds. Princeton emphasizes that combination printing allowed him to create a scale and complexity impossible in a single exposure^*3. The Met’s collection record likewise confirms the process and the work’s large composite construction^*4. This method removed the need to photograph every figure at once. Pose, scale, and light could be adjusted separately, so the exposure became a way to produce material for a later composition rather than the moment when the photograph had to be finished. Scholarship on composite photography has also noted that the methods of Rejlander and Robinson forced critics to address manual intervention and compositional judgment themselves as artistic values^*18.

The controversy surrounding the work in 1857 was not caused by nudity alone. Viewers accustomed to the nude in painting and sculpture encountered in photographic nudity the stronger sense that an actual body had stood before the camera. As Princeton notes, photography’s realism itself created a moral problem. Even within a fictional scene assembled through combination printing, each body retained a second level of reality: someone had really posed for it^*3.

Focusing only on Rejlander’s monumental composites obscures the range of his studies of people. The National Portrait Gallery’s Rejlander Album contains seventy-one photographs of hands, sleeping figures, children, prayer, comic gestures, and related subjects^*10. The NGA’s Lionel Tennyson survives as an example of a softer celebrity portrait distinct from the allegorical tableaux^*11. Large compositions in which figures were arranged for meaning and smaller studies of individual faces and gestures belonged to the same body of work.

Combination printing was not reserved for grand classical allegory. In Hard Times, an unemployed carpenter looks toward his sleeping wife and children while a translucent image of the same man places a hand on his wife’s head, turning a realistic scene of poverty into a moral and religious narrative. The Met connects the title to Dickens’s novel and notes that Rejlander himself described the work as a “spiritistical” photograph^*22. Here combination printing served to place anxiety, prayer, or hope—things not directly visible—within the same image as an actual working-class family.

Working with Darwin — Using Performed Expressions as Scientific Evidence

For The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, Darwin gathered photographs that allowed changes in face and body associated with emotion to be compared. The Darwin Correspondence Project notes that photography promised a way to fix fleeting expressions so they could be examined repeatedly afterward^*12. Rejlander produced many expressions using children, his wife, and himself as models, and several of the photographs were used in the book^*14. Exposure times still lasted several seconds or more, making it difficult to record crying infants or momentary expressions exactly as they occurred. Rejlander therefore performed expressions such as contempt, surprise, and helplessness himself^*15.

These performances were not treated as an exceptional compromise that invalidated scientific observation. The Darwin Project examines the tension between Darwin’s interest in “instantaneous” photographs and the fact that actual images could be constructed through the photographer’s performance and printing decisions^*13. Scholarship in the history of science likewise shows that Rejlander’s exaggerated poses provided comparative material for asking whether expressions of emotion could be reproduced voluntarily^*19. Research in the Journal of Victorian Culture notes that Darwin’s own study of expression included procedures in which family and acquaintances were asked to perform emotions deliberately^*24. For Rejlander’s photographs to function as comparative material, the circumstances of who reproduced which expression and how it was produced had to be part of the evidence.

Later Influence — Combination Printing and Performed Expression

Rejlander’s relation to later photographers is clearest where the evidence is explicit. Getty’s retrospective states that his combination printing and studies of people influenced the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll^*1. The National Portrait Gallery’s artist record and Rejlander Album document sustained work with celebrities, family members, children, hands, and bodily poses, showing that monumental combination pictures and close observation of individuals were not separate strands^*9. What later photographers inherited was not only a technical recipe for combination printing, but an expanded role for the photographer as someone who could stage the needed figure, select the photographic material, and construct meaning through arrangement.

The lasting issue was larger than the technical fact that multiple negatives could be combined. Asking people to perform, photographing gestures separately, and constructing meaning in the final image demonstrated that a photograph need not submit to a single moment before the lens. The National Science and Media Museum explains that combination printing had been used for procedures such as replacing skies, while Rejlander developed it into complex multi-figure compositions^*6. It is more precise to understand this within Victorian art photography than to draw a straight line to modern photomontage: Rejlander helped make the photographer’s selection and rearrangement of photographic material visible as acts of authorship. Emily Talbot’s research examines composite photography of the period through debates about the “machine” and artistic judgment^*18.

Reassessing Allegory, Portraiture, and Scientific Photography Together

The major 2018–19 retrospective organized around Getty reconstructed Rejlander’s career through portraits, children, scientific photographs, and working materials as well as The Two Ways of Life^*2. Moderna Museet likewise presents him across painting, portraiture, experimentation, international reception, and his Swedish origins^*8. The Science Museum Group preserves a substantial body of related works and documentation^*16. The National Gallery of Canada’s exhibition catalog brings together recent scholarship on the same expanded view of his career^*17. Getty ULAN records his Swedish birth, his principal activity in Britain, and his dual professional identities as painter and photographer^*20.

This reassessment makes Rejlander easier to understand as someone who demonstrated that photography’s claim to fact depended on different forms of making for different uses, rather than simply as a photographer who “broke photographic truth.” In allegory, the fiction assembled from more than thirty negatives was the condition of the work’s existence^*3. The Met likewise records The Two Ways of Life as a combination print made from multiple negatives^*4. In portraiture, the face and gesture of a sitter were concentrated in a single image; in Darwin’s scientific book, performed expressions became comparative evidence. The Royal Collection preserves works that also document royal reception of his photography^*7. Getty’s exhibition catalog examines allegory, portraiture, and scientific photography as different functions within one career^*21. Rejlander’s work leaves a question that remains relevant: the truth value of a photograph depends less on whether it was made in one exposure than on what it was intended to show and how the image was produced.

Rejlander also allegorized photography’s position as a new medium. In The First Negative, he reworked the classical story in which a lover traces a beloved’s shadow on a wall as the origin of painting, turning the act of fixing a shadow into a staged origin story for photography. The Musée d’Orsay interprets the work as an attempt by Rejlander, steeped in pictorial tradition, to position photography alongside the “noble arts”^*23. By giving photography its own story of origin, the work seeks to place the new medium beside painting and sculpture as an art.