Staged photography involves a performance enacted before the camera, akin to the arrested dramas of tableaux vivants and poses plastiques. It embraces studio portraiture and other more or less elaborate, peopled scenarios directed or manipulated by the photographer. In the 19th century, the intention was often allegorical. One of the earliest-known dramas staged for the camera was Hippolyte Bayard's Le Noyé (The Drowned Man, 1840), a self-portrait intended as a protest against the French government's apparent indifference to his development of a paper-based photographic process in 1839. An early example of staged photojournalism was Gioacchino Altobelli's (1814-78) image of Italian troops ‘storming’ Rome's Porto Pia on 21 September 1870, the day after the actual event.
Though the fictional and artistic impulses of staged photography have persisted throughout the medium's history, two major periods of staged photography can be identified: mid- Victorian narrative photography, and a late 20th-century critique of representation informed by conceptualism and postmodern theory.
Nineteenth-century staged photographs sometimes involved techniques such as multiple exposure or combination printing. Oscar Gustave Rejlander's controversial The Two Ways of Life (1857), for example, created from 32 wet-plate negatives, is an ambitious example of the latter. The discrete elements are staged in the studio, while the overall composition is manipulated in the darkroom. Henry Peach Robinson, who learned from Rejlander, won acclaim with painstakingly assembled pictures such as Fading Away (1858). The narrative intention of his imagery was frequently reinforced by the transcription of lines of verse on the mount, as with The Lady of Shalott (1861).
Many Victorian photographers, however, created narrative scenes using a single negative. In the 1850s-1960s, Lady Hawarden photographed her daughters in elaborate costumes and dramatic poses, to suggest and inspire stories. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) photographed young girls in a variety of roles, and choreographed images that made reference to dreams and myths. Julia Margaret Cameron conflated the ‘real’ with the ‘ideal’ in a series of photographic personifications, e.g. by portraying her maid as the Madonna. In 1874-5, she directed scenes from Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King for use as photographic illustrations. The famous collaboration between Countess Castiglione and Pierre-Louis Pierson between 1856 and 1898 produced over 400 staged scenes based on contemporary fiction and events from Castiglione's life.
But by far the largest number of 19th-century staged photographs were either by anonymous individuals, or by others whose names alone have survived. They were among the thousands of ‘operators’ who fed the boom in stereoscopic photography between the 1850s and the 1900s. In addition to countless views and architectural studies, stereo publishers issued narrative series on religious, historical, fairy-tale, and erotic subjects. Most used live models, costumed or not, while some incorporated figurines or cardboard cut-outs. Examples from the prolific London Stereoscopic Company included titles like A Ghostly Warning, a hand-coloured scene by James Elliott showing two men terrified by a female apparition, The Death of Thomas a'Becket, also by Elliott, and a Hamlet series by ‘Phiz’. These and thousands of other picture stories produced by hundreds of companies around the world anticipated both the cinema and other mass-market products like the photoromance.
In the 20th century, portraiture and self-portraiture continued to incorporate staged manipulations of the self, from de
In the late 20th century, staged photography became overtly theorized and politicized. Artifice was accentuated in a bid to question narrative authenticity and undermine belief in ‘documentary truth’. Quotation and parody were deployed as critical tools. Digital technology offered new ways to combine disparate moments and interrogate accepted meanings. From the 1970s, Jeff Wall problematized the relationship between photography, documentary, and art in his dramatizations of apparently ordinary street scenes and social encounters. As with much 19th-century staged photography, his constructed realities regularly quote from the history of painting, although his purpose is different. Depicting the photographer and his camera reflected in a large mirror, Picture for Women (1979) takes Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881-2) as its referent. Joel-Peter Witkin has constructed photographs that refer directly or indirectly to well-known paintings, in order to subvert stereotypes and transgress notions of taste; Las Meninas, New Mexico (1987) is a provocative appropriation of Velázquez's famous group portrait of King Philip IV of Spain's family (1656). Often adopting fancy dress and prosthetics, Cindy Sherman has emphasized artifice to question the representation of femininity, and the existence of an essential, unified subjecthood. The parodic intent of her black-and-white Untitled Film Stills (1970s-1980s) increasingly gave way, in later works, to images of the abject and macabre. Other authors of staged series from the 1980s and early 1990s include the American Duane Michals (Christ in New York, 1981), the Australians Farrell & Parkin (Rose Farrell and George Parkin, both b. 1949; Repentance, 1988; A Passion for Maladies, 1990-1), and the British photographer Colin Gray (b. 1956; The Parents, 1985).
In Twilight (1998-9), Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962) borrows familiar tropes from American cinema, and ‘makes them strange’. His images of suburbia are ambiguous, surreal, and unnerving, suggesting a narrative that resists resolution. Tina Barney (b. 1945) and Hannah Starkey (b. 1968) dramatize seemingly everyday situations. Their aim, however, is to suggest hidden psychological states. Members of Barney's family appear before the camera stilted, self-conscious, and tense. Starkey's tableaux, featuring teenage girls, articulate the apparent ennui of growing up in late capitalist society. In Spirit West (2001), Justine Kurland (b. 1969) directed a cast of adolescent girls who enact enigmatic dramas in the landscape.
— Jane Fletcher
See also christianity and photography.Bibliography
- Dérision et raison (1997).
- Henry, P., Fabula (2003).
- Jeff Wall: Photographs (2003).
- Kismaric, S., and Respini, E., Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 (2004)
