Oscar Gustave Rejlander was a pioneering Victorian art photographer and an expert in photomontage. His collaboration with Charles Darwin on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals has assured him a position in the history of behavioral science and psychiatry.
Background
Oscar Gustave Rejlander was born on October 19, 1817, in Sweden. He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. During his youth, his family moved to the Swedish-speaking community in Rauma, Finland (then Russia).
Education
First educated in Sweden, he then studied painting and sculpture in Rome, and learned photography from Nicholas Henneman in 1853 in England.
Career
In the 1830s, Oscar Rejlander relocated to England, initially settling in Lincoln, England. In the 1850s he abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve.
Oscar Rejlander set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. In the early 1850s, he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London, and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing, which he did not invent; however, he created more elaborate and convincing composite photographs than any prior photographer. Oscar Rejlander had articles feature in the Wolverhampton Chronicle newspaper, on 15 November 1854 an article called "Improvement in Calotypes, by Mr. O.G. Rejlander, of Wolverhampton" suggests that by 1854 he was experimenting with combination printing from several negatives.
Oscar Rejlander participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. In 1856 he made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images in about six weeks.
Oscar Rejlander moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and largely abandoned his early experiments with double exposure, photomontage, photographic manipulation, and retouching. Instead, he became one of Britain's leading portraitists, creating pictures with psychological charge. Oscar Rejlander became a leading expert in photographic techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold work through bookshops and art dealers. He also found subject-matter in London, photographing homeless London street children to produce popular 'social-protest' pictures such as "Poor Joe," also known as "Homeless".
Oscar Rejlander became seriously ill from about 1874. He died in 1875 with several claims on his estate and costly funeral expenses. The Edinburgh Photographic Society raised money for his widow on Rejlander's death and helped set up the Rejlander Memorial Fund.
(A moralistic photo montage of Rejlanders own work)
1857
A young Hallam Tennyson, son of Alfred Tennyson
Portrait of Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
1862
Hard Times
1860
Double self-portrait
Enchanted by a Parrot (detail)
1860
Connections
Oscar Rejlander married Mary Bull in 1862, who was twenty-four years his junior. Mary had been his photographic model in Wolverhampton since she was aged 14.
Oscar G. Rejlander: Artist Photographer
A fascinating survey of the varied career of an inventive and influential 19th-century photographer, from allegorical montage to Darwin’s catalog of emotions.