Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Stockholm, 19 October 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.

In the early 1850s 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 was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander's work and corresponded with him on technical matters.

This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks.

The image's partial nudity, which showed real women as they actually appeared and not the idealised forms then common in Victorian art, was deemed 'indecent' by some.

However the Photographic Society of Scotland later made amends and invited Rejlander to a grand dinner in his honour in 1866, held to open an exhibition that included many of his pictures.

Rejlander moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and largely abandoned his early experiments with double exposure, photomontage, photographic manipulation and retouching.

He became a leading expert in photographic techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold work through bookshops and art dealers.