Victorian headless portrait

In the photographs, the model's head appears separated from the body; often the sitter holds it in their own hands.

[1] Although this genre is called headless portraiture, it is the head that is always present in the photograph, and the body may be absent.

An early example of the genre is photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander's Head of St. John the Baptist in a Charger, a print made by combining two different negatives.

Photographer Henry Peach Robinson described Reilander's insistence on finding a model for John the Baptist saying that "Rejlander saw his head on the shoulders of a gentleman in the town.

It was some months before the artist ventured to ask the model to lend his head … and years before he obtained his consent.