Forerunner of digital technology

At a time when new lands were still being discovered and new scientific theories were being born, the visual arts revolution heralded by the advent of photography was not perceived by contemporaries as a new phase in the history of world culture. Among the 19th-century masters whose quest for art changed the modern world, photographer and artist Oscar Gustav Reylander. He is the youngest member of a pioneering generation, including the British “father of photography,” Henry Fox Talbot. It is with Reylander’s programmatic work Two Ways of Life 1857 that it is customary to count the birth of visual editing, which became a new way of expressing abstract ideas and concepts, which for centuries had been considered the prerogative of verbal language.

Oscar Gustav Reylander 1813-1875

Artist and photographer. Born in Sweden, studied painting in Italy, moved to England in 1840, where he began working with photography in 1852-1853. In 1857 he painted Two Ways of Life, which the same year was acquired into the Prince Albert Collection and exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, the world’s first fair of international art and culture.

Raylander presented the technique he developed for photographic montages to other authors, including the classic British photographer Henry Peach Robinson, who went on to create many montages.

In 1872, Raylander met Charles Darwin and became the author of photographic illustrations for his scientific work The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. The artist was also known for his genre photographic compositions and his active participation in discussions of photography in the British press.

A large collection of Reylander’s works, including the original of his famous composition “Two Ways of Life” from 1857, is housed at the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK. This museum has one of the largest and richest photographic collections in the world, especially since the collection of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain was deposited in the museum. The museum is also a center for the preservation, study and dissemination of various media: photography, film, television, animation, radio, digital communications and games.

At the time when new lands were being discovered and new scientific theories were being researched the contemporary audience failed to appreciate the visual arts revolution represented by photography as a new stage in the history of world culture. Among the 19th century masters whose quest for art changed the modern world, the photographer and painter Oscar Gustav Reylander. It is the youngest member of a pioneering generation, including the British “father of photography,” Henry Fox Talbot. It is with his program work “Two Ways of Life” 1857 that it is customary to consider the birth of visual editing, which became a new way of expressing abstract ideas and concepts that for centuries had been considered the prerogative of verbal language.

Raylander’s Two Ways of Life, a veritable moral manifesto of the Victorian era, contains the quintessence of the possibilities of visual editing. By means of photography the author succeeded in creating a work that combined the composition of a classicist painting and the content relevant to his era, the latest achievements of the technology of the time, and the author’s own discoveries. At the center of the composition is an old teacher his two students are on different paths, one heading for pleasure and unrighteousness, the other for education, science, craft, charity. Reylander’s “visual text” stunned his contemporaries and became the subject of numerous publications.

No less than the content of the work, viewers discussed its appearance: Reilander printed a photograph measuring almost 80 centimeters in length, which was common for picturesque paintings but by no means for photography of the mid-19th century. A century and a half before the advent of digital technology, Two Ways of Life was an example of a skillfully hand-crafted whole montage of more than 30 individual images. In the same year Two Ways of Life was acquired into the Prince Albert collection, which later became one of the sources of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s photographic collection. Thus, in the mid-nineteenth century, the crowned heads demonstrated to the public that photography was a new art form and that the photographic print was an object worthy of collecting.

Held today in the collection of the National Media Museum in Bradford and which has not left Great Britain for nearly a century, the original 1857 Raylander albumin print was unveiled this fall in America. Montaging Reality Project. “Oscar Gustav Raylander’s “Two Ways of Life” marks the important place that early British photography occupies in the history of world visual culture.

In 1857, Oscar Gustav Reylander created a multi-figure photographic composition, giving rise to a new trend in photography – photomontage. What before Reylander was no more than a technological device has, after his work, acquired a philosophy of its own. Looking from modernity at the author’s original mid-nineteenth-century print, examining its allegorical subjects, we catch ourselves thinking about the naivety and appealing sincerity of this moral manifesto of the past. But this was seen as the very purpose of art – to educate the public – in Europe, in America, in America of the century before last, whether it was the missionary work of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Itinerants or the painters of the new continent. In that century the concept of the norm, the certainty of good and evil in religious philosophy, in the ethical rules of society, and in politics were inextricably linked, especially in countries where religion continued to play an important role in the life of the state and citizens. That is why the seemingly rhetorical visual expression of the program in the composition “Two Ways of Life” by Raylander was nothing more than an attempt to find a form of dialogue between the young technological art of photography and its contemporary ideology. Simultaneously following the classical examples of art history, striving to create a new image similar to the best examples of painting of the past was the direction of the search of young photographers.

It is essentially a question of the two paths of photography that diverged in the twentieth century: that of the visual representation of social and political programs and that of the artistic exploration of form. The starting point for both directions was Reylander’s montage.

The active development of montage began as early as the twentieth century. The appearance in the 1920s and 30s of the iconic works of the American artistic avant-garde in painting, drawing, poster art, and photography is associated with montage thinking. The past century is also remembered for the active dialogue between photography and its creators and contemporary ideology: from apologetics to criticism, from the constructivist anthem of Soviet ideology to the current critique of bourgeois consumerism. Image and text montage – the basis of the influence of twentieth and twenty-first century mass-media phenomenon. The montage of fragments of images, scraps of words and textures are recognizable signs of contemporary art from Dadaism and Surrealism to Pop Art and Postmodernism.

Neither Niepce, nor Talbot, nor Daguerre have been shown publicly in America in the last century. With them began photography as a technology and as a new visual language of modernity. Raylander stands in this symbolic row of the founding fathers of photography, for he gave rise to a powerful current in its mainstream. That is why the showing of the original author’s print “Two Ways of Life” by Oskar Gustav Reylander is so important for the American art scene and for the viewer. Without touching the basics, it is difficult to grasp the extent of the cultural and civilizational achievements of the past two centuries, to understand the depth of time separating us from the recent past.

The exhibition, which accompanied the first American exhibition of Reylander’s montages, included over one hundred and fifty montages and collages created by photographers and artists over the past hundred years. Curators of the project have set a goal to depict two main directions of development of “the art of joining particularities to create a new reality” which is photomontage: the work on figurative expression of concepts in visible images and the work on previously unseen form. Many of the images in the exhibition collection were created by American masters, and not all of them are known to the general public. Exposition “Mounting Reality. “Two Ways of Life” by Oskar Gustav Reylander is a product of 2011, the period of development of post-industrial digital civilization. Not daring to ignore this fact, we might add that this exhibition, a tribute to Reylander, is a set of virtual projections of the history of photomontage of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Exhibition “Mounting reality. “Two Ways of Life” by Oscar Gustav Raylander was shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in September-October 2011 with the support of the British Embassy in America, Iris Foundation, State Museum of Fine Arts “ROSIZO”, American Ministry of Culture, RIA Novosti.

Project curators: Evgeny Berezner, Irina Chmyreva, Natalia Tarasova.