Oscar rejlander the two ways of life12/28/2022 ![]() The curtain, which extends across the image, has been expertly cut (in this case by hand) to allow details from lower layer to peek through, such as the stone work from the wall. The above detail is taken from the centre of the photograph, just above the sage, which depicts at least 4 layers that have been blended together. Rejlander introduced the concept of ‘ layering’ a photograph in a bombastic way. ![]() Detail of the central top portion of St Andrews’ copy of an original print of Rejlander’s “The two ways of life,” or “A pictorial composition from nature” (1857) As an everyday user of Photoshop, I’m going to ‘read’ the technical cues which can be found all over this print showing how Rejlander actually pulled off this amazing feat of photomechanical artistry. ![]() It is well known and well documented that Rejlander used Raphael and other Renaissance artists as his inspiration for the composition of this work, which depicts two apprentices, guided by a sage figure (who looks a great deal like Rejlander himself), who are presented with the path to vice or the path to virtue. Rejlander, an early commercial practitioner of photographic portraiture, had a mission: to show that photography was more than just a means to reproduce what one saw in real life, and to show that photography could be considered as art.įor this Reading the Collections post, then, I wanted to practice my hand at ‘reading a photograph’, and St Andrews recently acquired a copy of this iconic image. Rejlander’s 1857 “The two ways of life,” or “A pictorial composition from nature,” is a large-format (over 70cm wide) photo-montage of 30 negatives which took the photography and art circles of Great Britain by storm. One of the earliest examples of an image which is the result of serious ‘photoshopping’ came up for auction at Bonham’s earlier this autumn. St Andrews’ copy of an original print of Rejlander’s “The two ways of life,” or “A pictorial composition from nature” (1857) And now, of course, Photoshop has become so ubiquitous in our culture that it has become a lowercase verb. All of a sudden the PC became a tool, a medium in which to manipulate photographs and to create PC-drawn artwork. When my parents installed Adobe Photoshop 3.0 on our home PC, it evolved from the way to search the nascent internet or to use Encarta and to play the Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail game. I must’ve been 14 or 15 when my parents brought home a piece of software that would literally change their professional lives and would become an everyday tool of my working life.
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