Like genre paintings, genre photographs evolved in many directions in the second half of the 19th century, encompassing a vast array of subjects, from domestic scenes and re-creations of theatrical, literary, or fairy-tale subjects to pictures of village and small-town life. Genre images in both media usually incorporate a staged narrative, and a sentimental, moralizing, or humorous gloss that distinguishes them from realism or naturalism. Sequential treatment expanded the storytelling element still further. A classic of Victorian painted genre was Augustus Egg's three-part moral melodrama Past and Present (1858). Four years earlier, Roger Fenton had created a courtship sequence, A Romance, with the titles ‘Strong flirtation of which one spectator highly disapproves’, ‘Popping the question’, ‘Sealing the covenant’, and, ‘The honeymoon’.Genre painting was experiencing a revival just as photography was establishing itself in the middle decades of the 19th century. Although some early photographs taken by Talbot and Hill and Adamson in the 1840s seem influenced by this, the acknowledged masters of genre photography emerged later with the establishment of photographic societies and salons of ‘art’ photography. Photographers in the 1850s who were concerned to establish the medium's aesthetic credentials were often drawn to the genre mode, doubtless with the aim of emulating successful painters like Sir David Wilkie and William Powell Frith. Not only Fenton but Oscar Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Charles Dodgson are among those associated with genre photographs of various kinds. Their work illustrates the breadth of the term c. 1850-90. Rejlander went in for heavily moralizing subjects. Cameron recreated celebrated literary scenes. Dodgson captured children's tableaux vivants, and in individual studies evoked the types of child character popular in Victorian fiction. Robinson's country maids (actually middle-class girls dressed up), photographed in the environs of Leamington Spa, convey urbanizing England's increasingly idealized image of rustic life. (By contrast, Sutcliffe's fisherfolk and Emerson's rural workers are more naturalistically observed.) In Germany, where industrialization set in later and more rapidly than in England, both genre painting and photography, with particular emphasis on sentimentalized peasants and fishermen, retained a strong position at exhibitions and on the market. In Italy, pictures of travelling musicians (pifferari), water gatherers, and picturesque villagers eating spaghetti, by photographers like Michele Amodio and Filippo Belli (1836-1927), were an important part of the country's sizeable tourist photograph industry.
Quantitatively, however, the genre ‘salon’ photograph was insignificant compared with the industry created by genre stereographs, often devised and marketed in sets. Production of these peaked in the 1850s and remained strong for decades, with publishers like the London Stereoscopic Company and Underwood & Underwood marketing thousands of series and individual cards. All kinds of fictional narratives were used, from Hamlet to Little Red Riding Hood and saucy bedroom farces. (Many erotic sets, anticipating later peepshow, film, and video mini-narratives, might also be classified as genre.) But the term genre also widened to include real-life scenes that were essentially proto- documentary in character. By the early 20th century, classic genre was being eclipsed both by modernism and by the rise of the unstaged, more personal snapshot.
Anon., Italian Italians eating pasta, late 19th century. Albumen print
— Kelley E. Wilder
Bibliography
- Jones, J., Wonders of the Stereoscope (1976).
- Dewitz, B. v., Siegert, D., and Schuller-Procopovici, K. (eds.), Italien sehen und sterben: Photographien der Zeit des Risorgimento (1845-1970) (1994)
