576
poses and expressions of its three drinking fi gures,
was derived from scenes of jolly drinking companions
in the work of a number of Dutch painters (Graham
Smith, 1983). In France starting in 1841, Charles Nègre
executed a well-received series of photographs of child
chimney sweeps, a characteristically “low genre” theme
found in painting. In such cases, photographic scenes
that seemed to show a slice of life were in fact carefully
posed, owing in part to long exposure times. As in genre
paintings, the suggestion of everyday life in photographs
was often achieved by highly deliberate means.
The Victorian art photographer Oscar Gustav Rej-
lander summed this up when he wrote that a photog-
rapher should look for his subject matter “in his daily
life” at the social table, at a ball, an assembly, in the
streets “and if he wishes to produce what he has seen,
he can do so in the studio afterwards” (Spencer, 1985,
71). While Nègre and other calotypists had worked out
of doors, Rejlander, along with his student Henry Peach
Robinson, reenacted scenes of daily life in their studios.
Throughout the 1860s, Rejlander produced photographs
of street urchins in the studio; whether the child models
in these urban genre scenes were actually from the street
is unclear (Spencer, 1984, 18). Robinson, often making
use of combination printing, specialized in rural scenes.
Both photographers had much greater success with such
subjects than with their more overtly contrived literary
and allegorical pictures. With its perceived realism, pho-
tography was deemed by critics to be capable of rivaling
the work of genre painters, even as those same critics
condemned photographic attempts at High Art. “We
may have a photographic Teniers,” wrote one in 1856,
referring to the Flemish painter of peasant scenes, “but
not a photographic Raphael” (The Journal of the Pho-
tographic Society, 1856, 46). In addition to Rejlander
and Robinson, many notable British photographers of
the 1850s and 1860s, among them Roger Fenton, Lewis
Carroll, and Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, staged
narrative incidents of domestic life for the camera.
For the late nineteenth-century Pictorialist move-
ment, artfully constructed “slice of life” scenes again
constituted a central motif, as in the early work of Alfred
Stieglitz. His Paula (1889) seems to capture a woman
unawares as she writes a letter, light streaming in from
a nearby window. The image, despite its naturalism, has
been shown to correspond to similar themes in Dutch
painting, and to show other signs of clear contrivance
on the part of Stieglitz (Hulick, 1993).
With the advent in the late 1880s of snapshot photog-
raphy, which offered the possibility of truly spontaneous
images of daily life on a mass scale, genre remained a
distinct approach, identifi ed with the tradition of art pho-
tography. Writing in 1901, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe de-
fi ned “Genre photography” broadly as the arrangement
of fi gures to suggest an implied narrative. According to
Sutcliffe, genre subjects might be drawn from imagina-
tion, literary or artistic sources, or from observation. In
any case, they offered the photographer the challenge
of composing an image that could convey a sense of
momentary action. The photographer might at fi rst have
diffi culty realizing his conception, he wrote, but “with
a little practice he will soon learn the tricks of his trade
and place his fi gures so naturally that his friends and crit-
ics will mistake his composition for a lucky snapshot”
(Sutcliffe, 1980, 129). Despite superfi cial similarities,
the carefully executed genre photograph was anything
but a “lucky snapshot.”
Stephen PetersenGENRE
Greene, John Beasley. Mariette’s
Excavations to the Left of the Sphinx.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Anne
Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift,
2005 (2005.100.276) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.