O. G. Rejlander--Art Photographer.

Abstract

O. G. Rejlander (1818-1875) was a British photographer once famous as "the father of art photography." Trained as an artist, Rejlander initiated his photographic career in 1853. His primary goal was to demonstrate that photography was worthy of classification as a fine art. To this end, he studied Old Master art in theory and practice and applied these same principles to photography. Rejlander's subjects fall into four major categories--portraits, genre, "high art," and studies--each of which is treated in a separate chapter in this study. In each chapter, relevant theory is discussed first, followed by an analysis of representative photographs. The quality of Rejlander's portraits varied widely, but they were consistently more intimate and informal than the typical professional product. Rejlander's genre photographs constitute the main body of his work. In these, he was to some degree influenced by Dutch and Flemish genre, English narrative painting, and popular imagery. He devoted particular attention to images of the urban poor thereby establishing himself as one of the first photographers to document this subject. Although best known today for his "high art," allegorical photographs, Rejlander actually made only a very few such photographs. The Two Ways of Life, his most ambitious work, is analyzed in particular detail. Studies of expression and of the nude and draped human form were Rejlander's major preoccupation. He derived inspiration from nineteenth-century physiognomic treatises and Italian High Renaissance art. Rejlander's photographs and his theory of art photography had immediate and extended influence. In the short term, his photographs stimulated the development of genre photography and pictorial studies. In the long term, his theories had a more lasting impact; many nineteenth and twentieth-century photographers have adopted his attitudes toward the role of artistry, imagination and subjectivity in photography.