at the core
by
Douglas Messerli
Reljander: Artist Photographer / curated by Lori Pauli, Los
Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum of Art / I visited this show with Howard N. Fox
and Pablo Capra on May 21, 2019
One
of the very best photography shows of the year in Los Angeles was the large
Getty exhibition showing of the Swedish born, London-based photographer, who
went under his last name only, Rejlander (1813-1875).
Rejlander was, in fact, a master of
making us believe that the images we saw, mostly recreated in his studio and
processed through basically theatrical techniques—the photographer, we are
told, actually directed his subjects—constantly on the move—who he had often
found on the streets or through casual encounters, insisting on positioning
them, carefully lighting them, and spinning around them as a kind of theatrical
director to help them arrive at the positions in which he might shoot them. In
a true sense, this photographer was like an early studio director, forcing his
still-lives to play out stories that would later be seen in early and later
cinema productions.
Although the curator, Lori Pauli, doesn’t
precisely say this in her highly intelligent wall commentary of the show, one
might almost argue that was a kind of early film director who hadn’t yet found
the proper medium in which to present his artistic aspirations.
Stealing young boys and girls from the
streets, this artist froze them into positions that they may, in fact, have
experienced in street life: poverty, destitution, despair, and isolation from
the society in which they existed, while also offering them up gentle myths of
daily family life; yet the worlds he created for them, factual or imagined,
were of his own making. He was so clever in his ability to demonstrate their
various psychological attitudes, that Charles Darwin, a friend and subject of
several of Rejlander’s photos, used his “emotional” portraits to demonstrate
his own scientific views of human emotions.
If Sherman, perhaps, is a bit more honest
in using her own body as the subject of her cinema-like fantasies, is it really
that is not so very much different from William Wegman’s clever and charming in-studio
portraits of dogs, just as artificially conceived as Rejlander’s street urchins
and the beautiful women who posed for him?
Could a scene of a seemingly destitute
worker, sitting up through the night next to his wife and daughter not have an
important effect on his Victorian audience?
And then, there are is numerous nude
scenes, imagined orgies—or, at least debauchery—and visions of sexuality long
before his contemporaries were able to even admit to them. Rejlander was not a
voyeur; he made them up, but in so doing expressed and obvious titillated what
every Victorian knew was just below the surface, suggesting a bit of what Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) revealed in his own photographs of young
girls—yet with a far greater abandonment that Eleanor Antin satirizes in her
large-scale photographic studies. These photographs have something in common
with the Baroque and painterly images of the late 18th and early 19th
century artists, which take us into another time outside of the world in which
Oscar G. Rejlander existed.
In the end, this large photographic
exhibit has to be seen rather than simply talked about, so erratic and broad
was the artist’s vision.
Like
many things in the 19th century, it was stuffed with historical
sentimentality, but also challenged the very boundaries of the studio art in
which he created it.
Unlike some of the pieces in the adjunct
show that accompanies his work—although I was delighted by my introduction to
it—Rejlander’s art was not simply about gender, or family, or identity, but
encompassed a broad view of the human comedy; even if it was all imaginary,
created through his own camera and artistic techniques, it spoke to the core of
human existence.
Los Angeles, May
27, 2019
