ABSTRACT
Victorian photographers who lived in cities, with the roaring street beyond the studio window, possessed at hand a rich and complex subject matter. For most Victorians, photography of the poor meant studio-composed scenes of the kind produced by Oscar Rejlander. This genial Swede who had settled in England had been a painter before he took up photography and the scenes of simple, touching sentiment which were his forte undoubtedly reflect, in the manner of their composition, the practice of a studio painter. One of Rejlander’s favourite juvenile subjects was the street-boy. Rejlander’s imitators, for he had played an innovative role in introducing low-life material into photography, took up the stagiest aspects of his work: the broadly-conceived poses in which emblematic figures displayed their meaning to the audience at the back of the gallery, so to speak, in emphatic, unmistakable tones.
