Technically, Rejlander is responsible for raising combination photography to an entirely new level of quality and sophistication.

Marc Mayer, Director and CEO, National Gallery Lori Pauli, Curator of Photographs and exhibition curator, National Gallery Ann Thomas, interim Chief Curator, National Gallery. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles next year. His talents are now on full view in a show that took three years to prepare and features 140 of his photographs, paintings, drawings and prints: 14 are from the National Gallery’s collection while the rest come from a wide assortment of lenders, 29 altogether including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He started out as a talented painter before picking up a camera in the early 1850s, quickly establishing himself as a trailblazing photographer both technically and artistically. It’s kind of a sad story in a way because he’d made all these accomplishments both technically and conceptually in the way that we understand photography and yet he never saw any kind of financial success with these photographs and is kind of forgottenīorn in 1813 in Stockholm, Rejlander (rhymes with “highlander”) is thought to have moved to England about 1839. “Rejlander was always trying to prove to artists that photography was a really interesting tool and it was an innovative, radical tool for art making.” “I always find it interesting to look at an artist who hasn’t been really examined carefully before and unearth new things about (them),” says Lori Pauli, the Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery and the exhibition’s curator. Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

If you’ve ever seen a photograph that combines separate images (such as with an app that melds two faces), or has been manipulated or “Photoshopped,” then you can pretty much trace its roots back to Rejlander. The new exhibition at the gallery is being touted by organizers as the first-ever retrospective of the pioneering artist’s life and work. Now, it’s trying to correct that with Oscar G. The National Gallery of Canada feels history has unfairly abandoned an artist who deserves to be a household name. Serious students of photography may know him, but most people draw a blank when his name is mentioned, that is if it’s mentioned at all. Variously called the “Father of Art Photography” and “Grandfather of Photoshop,” the 19th-century photographer’s progeny are part of our lives today, even if his name isn’t. But that certainly hasn’t stopped others from crediting him with some influential offspring. Oscar Rejlander never fathered children of his own.

Rejlander the two ways of life