75
should have hesitated to give an answer in the affi rma-
tive.”^ In the meantime, however, some photographers
had 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 nature, but productions of mind and
thoughtful study.” “Of Mr. Rejlander’s pictures (for such
we may justly call them),” the reviewer concluded, “we
have no hesitation in saying that they are full of beauty
and full of mind.” It is evident from this that photogra-
phy, if it was to achieve the status of art, was expected
to combine beauty, intellect and study; conversely,
photography that merely transcribed the ordinary world
could not aspire to be art.
Rejlander linked art and photography in various
ways. This is evident from writings such as “An Apology
for Art-Photography,” a paper he read in February 1863
at a meeting of the South London Photographic Society,
and from his photographs. Rejlander produced a large
number of art studies based on fi gures in paintings by
Raphael, Titian and others in the belief that they would
prove useful to artists. In addition, he created photo-
graphs in the manner of Renaissance and Baroque paint-
ing and antique sculpture. In keeping with Fenton’s and
Hughes’s ideas, Rejlander selected the most appropriate
models for his subject pictures and arranged his sitters to
create compositions that were not necessarily present in
nature. On one famous occasion, reported by Rejlander
himself, the photographer magically transformed a
model drawn from the streets into an entirely plausible
decapitated head of John the Baptist. It might reasonably
be argued that Rejlander adapted the classical practice of
selection and synthesis to photography, creating pictures
that combined nature with beauty and intelligence. To
achieve this goal Rejlander developed a practice that
sometimes required the production of several negatives,
which he would then combine harmoniously to create
pictures that had no prior existence in nature or in the
studio. Rejlander’s most notable combination print is
his great allegorical picture The Two Ways of Life, the
most complex and controversial of his photographs. The
didactic, moralising and uplifting nature of The Two
Ways of Life situates it and other similar photographs
by Rejlander fi rmly in Jabez Hughes’s third category,
that of High-Art Photography.
Julia Margaret Cameron, who may have received
instruction in photographic technique from Rejlander
when he visited the Isle of Wight in 1863 to photograph
Alfred Lord Tennyson, consciously subverted the literal
characteristics of photography in order to create pictures
that sometimes concealed as much as they revealed. Like
her predecessors in the 1840s, Cameron also created
pictures that refl ected her positive familiarity with ear-
lier traditions in painting and sculpture, from the Elgin
Marbles to Renaissance masters such as Pietro Perugino,
Raphael and others. Among Cameron’s contemporar-
ies, Clementina, Vicountess Hawarden, and Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson also produced photographs in which
composition, light and visual intelligence outweighed
the mechanical transcription of quotidian reality. Cam-
eron, Carroll and Lady Hawarden, like Talbot and Hill,
also created pictures that were themselves fi ctions,
tableaux vivants inspired by works of art or literature,
ranging from the Bible to the novels of Sir Walter Scott
and the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Among Rejlander’s professional contemporaries, the
painter–photographers William Lake Price and Henry
Peach Robinson also employed the combination print-
ing process to create tableaux vivants in the manner
of Victorian paintings and to invent pictures that were
often literary and elevating in nature. In fact, Robinson
affi rmed in Picture Making by Photography (1886)
that his goal was “to induce photographers to think
for themselves as artists and to learn to express their
artistic thoughts in the grammar of art [my italics].”
Robinson’s The Lady of Shalott and Bringing Home the
May are linked closely to the contemporaneous tradition
of Pre-Raphaelite painting, echoing pictures by John
Everett Millais. Although it was heavily criticised whenAubry, Charles Hippolyte. Study of Leaves on a Background
for Floral Lace.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Paper Company
Collection, Purchase. Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2004
(2004, 106). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.