Oscar G. Rejlander. Artiste photographe brings together the work of Oscar Gustaf Rejlander, the Swedish-born artist who established himself in Victorian England as a photographer, painter, and lithographer. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2018, this 300-page hardcover catalogue accompanies an exhibition in Ottawa marking the 205th anniversary of his birth. Its subject is not only a celebrated image-maker, but a practice that helped define what photography might claim as art.
Rejlander’s importance rests in part on his technical and conceptual ambition. He became closely associated with combination printing, assembling several negatives into a single image, and with photographic “art studies” that engaged the conventions of painting. His 1857 masterpiece, Two Ways of Life, made through the use of more than thirty negatives, became one of the nineteenth century’s most important and controversial photographs. The book places that achievement alongside humorous and genre scenes, self-portraits, paintings, and prints, allowing the range of his activity to emerge rather than reducing him to a single canonical work.
The catalogue also situates Rejlander within the Victorian artistic context and examines his influence on photographers including Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, and Lady Hawarden. That broader framing matters: Rejlander appears here not as an isolated technical pioneer, but as a participant in the period’s negotiations between photography, fine art, narrative, and visual experiment. The publication’s 225 colour illustrations support this expansive view, presenting a substantial panorama of a practice whose biographical record remains comparatively fragmentary.
For collectors of nineteenth-century photography, the book offers a focused account of an artist often invoked through reputation but best understood through the variety of his methods and subjects. Its French-language presentation, hardcover format, 25 × 30 cm dimensions, and carefully assembled exhibition context make it a useful reference as well as a considered survey. It deserves attention for bringing Rejlander’s photographic and graphic work into the same field of view, preserving the tensions—between invention and evidence, artifice and observation—that give his work its continuing force.
