1188
assembled from over thirty separate plates. The fi nal
print evokes after Rafael’s School of Athens, but Rej-
lander’s allegory had an expressly Victorian fl avor, with
one side representing virtuous activities like reading and
tending to the sick, while the other side depicts several
deadly sins. The inclusion of languorous, bare-breasted
nudes provoked a fair amount of controversy when it
was fi rst shown, even though Queen Victoria found suf-
fi cient merit in The Two Ways of Life to purchase a copy
for Prince Albert, who reportedly kept it on his wall for
the rest of his life.
Many of Rejlander’s other photographs are equally
innovative. Rejlander grasped in prescient ways the
potential of the photographic medium to capture an
unfolding scene or even stop action long before such
images were technically possible. In many of his genre
studies he conveys a sense of spontaneity in a scene,
despite the cumbersome wet collodion process and slow
exposure times. In a picture like The Juggler (c. 1855)
he constructed an effective illusion of a man juggling
several decades before such images were technically
possible. Rejlander’s accomplishment lay in his abil-
ity to conceive of such images as natural extensions of
photographic seeing.
Many of Rejlander’s genre pictures and portraits
involve children, a photographic subject that was very
popular with the masses as well as photographers like
Hill and Adamson, Charles Dodgson, and Julia Margaret
Cameron. Here again, he experimented with various
moods, ranging from depictions of angelic children
(again evoking Rafael) to poor waifs who could easily
populate the novels of Charles Dickens. He photo-
graphed children at play, at rest, in the nude, and at
their mother’s breast. His most commercially success-
ful photography, Jinx’s Baby, depicted a small child in
the midst of a howling cry. This photograph was one of
roughly eighteen pictures which Rejlander produced as
illustrations for Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).
Rejlander brought a sense of humor to photography,
a rarity among 19th century photographers, who were
a rather somber and serious lot. Only Nadar, among
Rejlander’s contemporaries, expresses a comparable joi
de vivre in his photographs. In one combination print,
O. G. Rejlander Presents O.G. Rejlander (c. 1871), he
theatrically presented himself as an alter-ego militia
man. In Happy Times, he and his wife, both well into
middle age, smiled jauntily at the camera with unmasked
good humor. Rejlander depicted scampish children
being chastised by cranky, outraged elders. Rejlander
also enjoyed satire: in Did She? (c. 1862), two men gos-
sip and snicker about some unsuspecting young lady,
while The Empress Nicotena (c. 1857) depicted an old
and weathered crone holding a mask of youth in front
of her face with one hand as she reached for tobacco
with the other.
Some of Rejlander’s studies convey a sense of sexual-
ity that defy the typical Victorian stereotypes. Rejland-
er’s approach was at times light-hearted, as in Washing
Day (c. 1855), where a two older women washed clothes
in the foreground while a younger woman hung hosiery
on a line to dry while openly fl irting with a young man.
Some of his studies of paired, unclad women suggest
lesbianism, and one light-hearted photograph featured
two soldiers who fl ank a third man who is dressed as
a woman. Masturbation was clearly implied in The
Bachelor’s Dream (c. 1860), where a sleeping man re-
clined beside a dress hoop populated toy female fi gures,
his hand resting on his groin. Paintings or photographs
that address issues such as these are extremely rare in
Victorian England, or even on the Continent, where the
underground traffi c in photographic pornography was
more developed.
Despite a lengthy and prolifi c career, which included
several published essays on photography, Rejlander
died impoverished and largely forgotten. The press
complained about what they perceived to be shoddy
technique, and others questioned some of his subject
matter. Rejlander’s positions on the artistic potential
of photography were controversial in some quarters,
and his adventuresome efforts to expand the range of
photographic expression no doubt confounded some
of his peers. Peter Henry Emerson’s scathing review
in 1890 of Rejlander’s posthumous, four hundred print
retrospective sealed his fate for several generations of
Modernist photographers and historians.
In his published writings, Rejlander was a con-
sistent champion of photography’s legitimate role in
the production of art by painters and, increasingly,
photographers themselves. Like Arago and Talbot, he
grasped refl exively some of the possibilities of photog-
raphy, both in the ambitions of combination printing
and naturalistic, “stop-action” scenes, and in his ability
to achieve psychological insight in a broad variety of
photographic genres.
David L. Jacobs
See also: Cameron, Julia Margaret; Dodgson,
Charles Lutwidge; Hill, David Octavius, and Robert
Adamson; and Victoria, Queen and Albert, Prince
Consort.Further Reading
Jones, Edgar Yoxall, Father of Photography: O. G. Rejlander.
Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles (Holdings) Ltd.,
1973.
Oscar Gustav Rejlander. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998.
Spencer, Stephanie, O. G. Rejlander: Photography as Art. Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981.