![]() Even within his own lifetime, Rejlander’s insistence on storytelling over objective record meant that his work was falling out of favour and nothing that has happened since has done much to change that. It swam against the currents of art-making that were already flowing toward spontaneous observation, a task to which photography was ideally suited. Rejlander’s campaign to elevate photography to the level of art by using it to reproduce traditional categories of painting, such as genre, allegory or history, turned out to be a dead end. ![]() Mary Constable and her brother, an 1866 albumen silver print by Oscar G. There is no denying the technical mastery the photographer flourished as he assembled all these negatives into a seamless whole – and there’s no sympathizing with the work’s simplistic moralism. Today, we would recognize any amount of manipulation as the art photographer’s prerogative and readily accept the nude as a subject, but the preachy Two Ways of Life is a prime example of why Rejlander remains a figure of more historical than aesthetic interest. The artistic community was also divided over combination photography, questioning whether the manipulation of the negatives was truthful. It was one thing to portray nudes as allegorical or historical figures in paintings, quite another to show the naked model’s actual flesh through the new medium of photography. ![]() The photograph, represented in two different versions in the Rejlander retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), was controversial in the artist’s own day. It’s not hard to see who in this equation is going to have the most fun – although that was surely not Rejlander’s point. On one side, he loses a wayward son to figures of debauchery, most of them represented by naked women on the other, he encourages an upright son toward sober allegories of marriage, charity and learning. A bearded old man stands at the centre of the composition, the apex of a low triangle. Using 32 different negatives, some of single figures, some of small groups, he created the monumental Two Ways of Life (Hope in Repentance). In 1857, Victorian photographer Oscar Rejlander exhibited what is still considered his most important work.
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