Living Pictures: The Art of Staging in Contemporary Photography

The Dining Room (Francis Place) (II), 1997

© Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

The Dining Room (Francis Place) (VI), 1997

© Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

In Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, the Wellington Brys, a couple insecure about their social standing in New York society, want to attract new friends. To succeed, they must pull off a bold party.

After careful thought, the “two baits” they use are an evening of expensive music and tableaux vivants, a series of living pictures popular among upper-class Victorians. The Brys enlist a dozen fashionable young women and costume them as characters from paintings by Goya, Van Dyck, Titian, and Watteau. The women model scenes of nymphs dancing across a patch of flower-strewn grass or garlanding an altar until the final red velvet curtain opens on Lily Bart, the novel’s protagonist, presented without artifice. She is herself the work of art. While this moment marks Lily’s social triumph, it also displays the era’s love of the art of staging. With attention to lighting, costumes, props, backdrops, and set pieces, they re-created lushly theatrical scenes from classical art. Of the constructed tableaux, Wharton writes, “To unfinished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.”

The Dining Room Table (Francis Place) (III), 1998

© Sarah Jones, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

In the late eighteenth century, Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to Naples, introduced what she called “attitudes” to European society. Draped in a simple shawl, her hair down around her shoulders, she used gesture and expression to transform herself into figures from classical sculptures and vases. Though at first they considered it improper, Victorians could not resist the performative charm of Lady Hamilton’s attitudes, and the popular entertainment quickly evolved into elaborate tableaux. Transformation into imaginary characters offered a socially acceptable way of flaunting a woman’s beauty; she could let down her hair, kick off her slippers, and slip into a revealing

Ryan Schude, The Diner. Sun Valley, California. 2008

Ryan Schude, The Saturn. Mid-City, Los Angeles. 2007

costume. Trying on alter egos represented a form of emancipation from rigid social roles.

When photography was invented in 1839, the familiar practice of role playing and staging scenes for tableaux became a natural subject for the new medium. People were quick to grasp the potential of the photograph as a virtual stage. Photographers became directors, posing “actors,” choosing the sets, props, and costumes, and determining the lighting and placement in implied narratives. Early examples of the influence of tableaux vivants on Victorian photography are plentiful. At an estate near Scotland, between 1843 and 1847, English photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson made photographic illustrations of scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Antiquary, posing their figures in front of handmade backdrops and using atmospheric lighting. For his photographs, Swedish-born Oscar Gustave Rejlander hired actors from traveling tableau vivant groups and arranged them like theatrical performers

Jonathan Hobin, diana’s dead, In the Playroom, 2010

Jonathan Hobin, The Twins, In the Playroom, 2010

Jonathan Hobin, Triple Threat, In the Playroom, 2013

in front of a backdrop painted with a landscape and framed by a large curtain on either side. Charles Darwin later hired him to shoot several photographic illustrations for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Julia Margaret Cameron cast well-known public figures as characters in her neighbor Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Idylls of the King, a retelling of the Arthurian...