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TAFT, ROBERT
and posed them in imitation of some of the grandest mas-
terpieces in the public galleries, and then photographed
them” (Wall, n.p.). Wall recommended this practice as
the best training for an aspiring art photographer, who,
like Wilkie with his tableaux, needs to know how to
make pictures out of living models. The problem of the
imperfect model as opposed to the idealized fi gures of
painting was often noted in mid-century photographic
criticism, suggesting that photographs of pictorial or
literary subjects were tainted by the intermediate step of
needing to construct a tableau with real people as actors.
At the same time, however, there was quite a vogue in
British photography for just such images among profes-
sionals and amateurs alike.
Both Henry Peach Robinson and Lewis Carroll
frequently staged scenes that were meant to conjure
up paintings or that made literary reference. Whereas
Robinson’s efforts are professional in the extreme, us-
ing hired models and carefully constructed scenarios,
Carroll’s tableaux involving children, such as St. George
and the Dragon, ca. 1874, are notable for their play-
ful, amateurish quality. For her Studies of the 1860s,
Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, while spurning
period costumes and props, posed her fi gures in attitudes
reminiscent of paintings as well.
A new dimension was added to the photographic
tableau with the advent of stereoscopic photography.
From the 1850s through the 1880s and beyond, narrative
tableaux became a staple of commercially published
stereographic cards internationally. This hugely popular
form came to involve extensive story-telling sequences
of photographic tableaux, common at the turn of the
century (Henisch and Henisch, 70–77).
Among art photographers, perhaps the work of Julia
Margaret Cameron most consistently and ambitiously
incorporates the tableau. Her Madonnas and saints,
allegorical fi gures, and subjects from poetry involve
servants, family, or friends costumed and arranged
in sometimes quite elaborate mises en scène. These
works, enacted wholly for the camera, often allude to
the amateur theatrical, with spare, makeshift stages and
distinctly non-professional actors. For one of her last and
most involved projects, Cameron in 1874 spent several
months, and enlisted dozens of models, to produce
twelve large-scale photographic images of Arthurian
subjects to illustrate a volume of her friend Alfred
Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (Bajac, 5). Critics
and historians in the mid-twentieth century would con-
demn such works of the Victorian art photographers as
misguided attempts to produce “imitation paintings,”
preferring, in the case of Cameron, her simple and
direct portraits to her fanciful literary scenes. With the
shift to a postmodern aesthetic in the late twentieth
century, however, the practice of staging fi ctional scenes
again came into prominence in photography, and with
it a renewed appreciation for the role of the tableau in
nineteenth-century photography.
Stephen Petersen
See also: Art photography; Cameron, Julia Margaret;
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Carroll, Lewis); Genre;
Hawarden, Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone; Hill,
David Octavius, and Adamson, Robert; Rejlander,
Oscar Gustav; and Robinson, Henry Peach.Further Reading
Bajac, Quentin., Tableaux Vivants: Fantaisies Photographiques
Victoriennes (1840–1880), Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des
Musées Nationaux, 1999 (exhibition catalogue).
British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art
Tradition, edited by Mike Weaver, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Daniel, Malcolm, R., “Darkroom Vs. Greenroom: Victorian Art
Photography and Popular Theatrical Entertainment.” Image
vol. 33, no. 1–2 (Fall 1990): 13–20.
Henisch, Heinz K., and Bridget A. Henisch, The Photographic
Experience, 1839–1914: Images and Attitudes, University
Park, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984.
Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical
Arts in Nineteenth Century England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983.
Sieberling, Grace, and Carolyn Bloore, Amateurs, Photography
and the Mid-Victorian Imagination, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
Stevenson, Sara, “Tableaux, Attitudes and Photography” in
Van Dyck in Check Trousers: Fancy Dress in Art and Life,
1700–1900, 45–63. Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, 1978..
Wall, A.H., “Rejlander’s Photographic Studies—Their Teachings
and Suggestions (Reprinted from The Photographic News,
vols. 30–31), London, July–February, 1886–1887” in The
Photography of O.G. Rejlander: Two Selections, edited by
Peter C. Bunnell, New York: Arno Press, 1979.TAFT, ROBERT (1894–1955)
Born of missionary parents in Japan in 1894, Robert Taft
grew up in the U.S. After receiving a B.A. in history in
1916 and a Master’s in 1919, he joined the University of
Kansas where he obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry (1925)
and taught chemistry until his death in 1955. An amateur
of art and history, Taft was drawn to photographic his-
tory upon realizing, around 1932, that no existing book
would satisfy his curiosity about early photography in
the American West. He started amassing information by
exploring the 19th-century press and writing old-tim-
ers and local historical societies. Out of this enormous
personal effort came a series of articles in Kansas and
other Western magazines, followed by his masterful
Photography and the American Scene: A Social History
1839 – 1889 (1938), the fi rst comprehensive history of
American photography, which has become a classic of
the socio-cultural history of the medium. Along with
many lesser publications on photographic history he also