REJLANDER TWO WAYS OF LIFE FULL
He was so effective that Darwin recruited him to document humanity’s full range of facial expressions. Approaching subjects like a director treats actors, he persuaded them to project emotion as if they were on stage. Rejlander was at his best taking portraits. ‘Non Angeli sed Angli’ (1854-1856) © Emile Askey The Getty celebrates a sensibility that undermines stark realism with sentimentality, but that’s also heartbreaking, hilarious, and technically accomplished. And digital DIY has finally done away with any lingering belief that the camera is telling the unvarnished truth. Postmodern practitioners uninterested in authenticity – Gregory Crewdson, say, or Cindy Sherman – have embraced the theatrical model. This retrospective offers a counter-narrative that suddenly seems relevant. Composite narratives fell into disrepute, and artists sided with Alfred Stieglitz’s definition of “direct photography” – “brutally direct, devoid of flim-flam devoid of deception and any “ism”. In the 20th century, sober modernists moved away from a path they found bathing. Rejlander’s most famous work often appears in the history of photography as a vulgar specimen of Victorian kitsch. Prince Albert adored the epic painting, and Queen Victoria purchased a print for each of the royal residences: Windsor, Osborne House and Balmoral, where it was intended for the prince’s lodge. “Works of art should not be executed by mechanical artifice,” whispered one critic. Some saw the image as an assault by industrial production on the hand-made domain.
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“Mourning” (1864) © Museums of Fine Arts of San Francisco ‘The Juggler’ (c1865) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London One reviewer praised Rejlander’s technical prowess, but claimed there was “no art or decency in such a photograph.” It was one thing to idealize a naked Venus, as painters had done for centuries, and quite another to allow “the public to see photographs of naked prostitutes, in the veracity of flesh and blood and in the thoroughness of details ”. The beginnings of the work provoked accusations of impropriety and degradation. “Two Ways of Life,” for example, is a composite of over 30 negatives, seamlessly stitched together over a century before Photoshop first shone in a programmer’s eye.
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Prankster, darkroom virtuoso and technological proselyte, he had never had a retrospective until the explosion of 150 prints at the Getty Center, with an enlightening light on his techniques. One of the forgotten pioneers of this art form was Rejlander, who started out as a painter in his native Sweden and then settled as a photographer in mid-19th-century England.
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Even the grizzled prophet in the center seems indecisive it leans towards lust in one version and towards light in another. If there are downsides to sin, the photographer does not dwell on them. Yes, the devotional path is its own reward and all that, but the picture makes the voluptuary side much more appealing. Like a bit of elaborate Victorian moralization, Rejlander’s “Two Ways of Life” equivocates. Your choice, says the old man: to gratify the body or uplift the soul? There, the patients are healed and the penitents absolved, the workers work with a hammer and a saw, a scholar points his compass on a globe. The other, eyes closed in a delighted sobriety, walks towards a future of studies and good works. A greedy youth leans to the right on the stage, towards a cornucopia of temptations: drink, game and a multitude of languid nudes. On display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, a wise bearded man escorts two young men to the forefront of life. In an 1857 photograph so epic and populous that it resembles a history painting, Oscar Rejlander presents an allegory of the tension between virtue and debauchery.