Oscar Gustave Rejlander, "The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush" (about 1856), albumen argent print (the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

LOS ANGELES — Fifteen years later on Oscar Rejlander's death in 1875, fellow British photographer Peter Henry Emerson mockingly credited Rejlander with developing the "wrong-headed method" of combination printing. He called for Rejlander'due south "manipulative and overly theatrical" process — which involved printing from numerous negatives to create ane photograph — to be abased. The exhibitionOscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, which recently traveled to the Getty Eye from the National Gallery of Canada, serves to rectify the century of oversight initiated past critics similar Emerson. Assembling over 140 works, information technology covers each phase of Rejlander's career, from portraitist, to combination printer, to scientific illustrator.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, "The First Negative" (1857), albumen silver print (Musée d'Orsay, Paris Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Fine art Resources, NY / Patrice Schmidt)

This unprecedented retrospective positions Rejlander as a showman whose romantic and professional partnership with pantomime actress Mary Bull yielded several thriving commercial studios. After emigrating from Sweden to England in 1839 and taking upwardly photography in 1852, he became 1 of the first to recognize photography'southward potential as a "handmaid of art" — exemplified by early on photographs similar "The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush." This tiny impress served to demonstrate how photography could preserve an allegorical scene for a painter'due south extended report. It also functioned as a self-portrait and hinted at Rejlander's subconscious ambitions: reflected in the convex mirror, he presents himself equally a modern-24-hour interval January van Eyck.

The exhibition meticulously highlights Rejlander's many innovations, including the introduction of narrative into photographs. In "The Outset Negative," he restages Pliny's account of the origins of painting, boldly suggesting that the human action of tracing a shadow is more alike to creating a photographic negative than a painting. To exist certain, Rejlander's underlying motive involved proving the artistry of his newfound profession. Another novelty involved using combination printing to visualize sitters' private thoughts within the photographic frame. One spectacular example shows Rejlander posing as a wounded Garibaldi, encouraged in his quest to unite Italy by a mental vision of Rome that appears double-printed in the clouds overhead.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, "Ii Means of Life (Hope in Repentance)" (1857), albumen silver print (Moderna Museet, Stockholm)

Rejlander's ambition to elevate photography to the narrative complexity and ballsy scale of painting reached its apex in 1857, with "Two Means of Life." This photograph was created by press figures from 30 negatives to create a scene that never existed in reality. The complex tableau — shown in 2 variations inside the exhibition — depicts a philosopher guiding a youth as he decides between piousness and depravity. The gallery surrounding Rejlander's magnum opus illustrates the binary of sacred and profane, with nude figure studies appearing to the right, and religious characters shown to the left. Rejlander modeled "Two Ways of Life" subsequently Raphael'due south "The School of Athens," and considered his own piece of work an artistic masterpiece. Unfortunately, critics did not agree: "Works of high fine art are not to be executed by a mechanical contrivance," ane rebuked. Others had concerns near the "flesh-and-claret truthfulness" of his photographic nudity. (Despite explanatory labels, gimmicky viewers may have trouble understanding but what was so distasteful — either morally or technically — about the photograph.)

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, "Ariadne" (1857), albumen print from a moisture collodion negative (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund)

Although Rejlander eschewed combination printing post-obit this scandal, other sections of the exhibition make clear that he continued to experiment. He was perhaps the first to market place photographic nude studies to artists, and he even used them to test the anatomical accuracy of the Onetime Masters. His photograph "Ariadne" was created, in part, to expose the unnatural pose and elongated feminine proportions in Titian'due south "Venus and Adonis." Many of Rejlander's contemporaries came to rely on these nude studies, and the exhibition contains at least three originally owned by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, "Mental Distress (Female parent'south Darling)" (1871), carbon print of a polychrome drawing from a photograph image (the Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and Fine art Fund Epitome © Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

While Rejlander'southward photographs may occasionally announced overly sentimental or moralizing to contemporary viewers, they contain traces of a radical methodology. Not content to accept the limits of the medium, Rejlander continually pushed its technical boundaries to suffuse photography with an undeniable artistry. Fifty-fifty subsequently controversy, he maintained a strikingly conceptual approach, writing, "It is the listen of the artist, and not the nature of his materials which makes his product a work of art." One comes away from the exhibition feeling somewhat incredulous that Rejlander has not achieved the aforementioned recognition equally his apprentice, Julia Margaret Cameron, or boyfriend combination printer, Gustave Le Gray. Our nowadays digital historic period may correspond the platonic moment, so, to revisit the work of this pioneer (now known as the "Grandfather of Photoshop"), whose so-chosen "mechanical contrivances" were met with considerable skepticism during their ain time.

Oscar Rejlander: Creative person Photographer continues at the Getty Centre (1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles) through June 9.

Dana Ostrander is an fine art historian, curator, and author living in Southern California. Currently a doctoral candidate, she is completing a dissertation that considers the intersections of medical photography... More by Dana Ostrander