Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Sweden, 1813 – Clapham, London, 18 January 1875) 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 behavioural science and psychiatry.

His exact date of birth is uncertain, but was probably 1813. He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. He studied art in Rome where he saw photographs of the sights, and then initially settled in Lincoln, England. He abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve. Other accounts say he was inspired by one of Fox Talbot's assistants.

He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. Around 1850 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 genre work and portraiture. He also created erotic work, using as models the circus girls of Mme Wharton, street children and child prostitutes - his Charlotte Baker series remains notorious.

Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing from around 1853, which it is possible he may have invented. He had articles feature in the Wolverhampton Chronicle, on 15 November 1854 an article called "Improvement in Calotypes, by Mr. O.G. Rejlander, of Wolverhampton" it suggests that by 1854 he was experimenting with combination printing from several negatives. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander's early child work and corresponded with him on technical matters. Rejlander later created one of the best known & most revealing portraits of Dodgson.

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