Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Europe and the United States experienced a time of fascination with beheading, even if simulated. A fad followed in the wake of the new technologies of the time. In the 1850s and at the beginning of the following decade, photography as an art form deserved a lively debate. The camera was seen as a means to overcome reality and express imagination. Victorian England shaped the real with the contours of the ideal. Artificial photography was born in darkroom studios. Soon, photographs of tiny humans captured in bottles were circulating, spirits were finding peace with their lost family, and imagined creatures were swarming in cities. “Today’s manipulated images stem from a centuries-old lineage, born in the early days of photography with techniques such as multiple exposure, negative retouching, combined printing and photomontage. Techniques at the service of politics, art, information, entertainment and commerce”, reminds us in the text that presents the online exhibition of manipulated photographs on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. The digital exhibition follows the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop initiative that a decade ago brought together nearly 200 snapshots that offer us disconcerting scenes. Among them, a morbid repast. The photograph, for the first time on public display in 2013, shows a pair of diners fascinated by the delicacy served to them for breakfast: a human head on a plate. In 1900, photographer William Robert Bowles produced that costumed image in his studio in Kentucky. At the time, the fashion for “headless photographs” had crossed the Atlantic, at a time when it was beginning to wane in the British Isles. In the previous 50 years, thousands of citizens had themselves decapitated in photographic snapshots. To the spectator’s surprise, everyone was in good health. Unlike the condemned man in Bruegel the Elder’s painting, the destiny of those targeted in the camera lens was one of entertainment. Among the most prolific beheading photographers of the Victorian era was Oscar Gustave Rejlander, born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1813, and based in England from the 1830s.
Specialist in photomontage, Rejlander began his artistic career as a portrait painter. Later, fascinated by the potential of photography, he explored printing from two negatives. Oscar then began a two-decade journey in photomontage with one of his first works representing the head of Saint John the Baptist arranged on a tray. This was followed by countless photographs of ordinary citizens with “lost minds”. Along with the photographic collaboration with naturalist Charles Darwin in the work The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Rejlander worked closely with photography amateur Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose letters would consecrate under the pseudonym of Lewis Caroll, author, among other titles, of Alice in Wonderland. The Swede living in Great Britain had in his allegorical work of 1856, The Two Paths of Life, its greatest moment. The photograph combines 32 images, worked on over six weeks. Shown in 1857 in Manchester, the play reveals a man drawn to the paths of virtue and vice, respectively by a good angel and a bad angel. The nudity of some of the extras shocked part of Victorian society. An outcry of repudiation appeased by Queen Victoria’s public praise of photography. The monarch, passionate about the theme of manipulated photography, would acquire three copies of the work, in a batch of 22 images signed by Oscar Gustave Rejlander.
The fascination with “headless photographs” took over the work of a British photographer based in Brighton for several years. For a future note, Samuel Kay Balbirnie, who before photography had begun studies in medicine, did not just leave an album full of Victorian beheadings. Balbirnie also advertised his services as an eccentric photographer in the press at the time. On May 23, 1878, the pages of the Brighton Daily News newspaper featured Balbirnie’s advertisement: “Headless Photographs – Ladies and gentlemen photographed with their heads floating”. An offer of photographic services that added other items such as “Photographs of spirit – Ladies and gentlemen captured floating in the air in the company of tables, chairs and musical instruments”.
It is believed that it was the Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard, born in 1801, pioneer of photography, who was the first to suggest the combination of two photographic negatives as a means of creating unreal images. For history, the contemporary of Louis Daguerre – inventor who patented the first photographic process – left the principles that would serve in the future the development system used by Polaroid. The 19th century brought an approach to the world that Mia Fineman, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of the book Faking Itsubstantiates in a sentence regarding manipulated photography: this “contradicts a long-standing banality, that ‘images don’t lie’”.
