Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s work, while not formally categorized, can be grouped into key themes, one of which is Studies of Expression, highlighting his deep fascination with capturing the breadth of human emotions through photography. This thematic focus found one of its most impactful expressions in Rejlander’s collaboration with Charles Darwin.
Darwin was in search of compelling visual documentation to illustrate his research on the universality of emotions across humans and animals. Rejlander’s skill in capturing fleeting emotional states, through precise posing and careful lighting, made him an ideal collaborator for this groundbreaking research. Their partnership seamlessly bridged art and science, with photography serving both as empirical evidence and a medium for Rejlander’s interpretive artistry.
The collaboration involved adapting Rejlander’s earlier works as well as creating new images tailored to Darwin’s needs. The artistic vision of this partnership combined authenticity and technical sophistication. Rejlander’s photographs were not mere illustrations of Darwin’s theories but interpretations imbued with his understanding of human nature and theatrical sensibilities. Although Darwin sought genuine, uncontrived expressions, the technological constraints of early photography necessitated staged and directed poses, blurring the boundary between spontaneity and artifice. Rejlander overcame these limitations by frequently using himself as a model, capturing intense emotions such as fear, disgust, and indignation.
The wet-collodion process, though capable of high detail, presented significant challenges due to its slow speed. Rejlander’s technical innovations, including his adaptation of a stereo camera to capture sequential images on a single plate, set new benchmarks in portrait photography. By alternating exposures from one lens to the other, he documented subtle shifts in expression over time—a technique that anticipated modern motion photography and added depth to Darwin’s study of facial nuances.
On publication in 1872, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals—his only photographically illustrated book—drew notice for the novelty of Rejlander’s plates, even as their staged methods prompted debate. Subsequent reassessments have treated these images as hybrid art-science documents, with museum presentations and scholarly editions foregrounding both their evidentiary limits and historical value. Today, Studies of Expression within this collaboration is cited for shaping conversations on affect, early scientific photography, and performance before the camera.
