Staged Photography

About Staged Photography

Staging is as old as photography. In Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) Hippolyte Bayard posed as a corpse to protest that his own invention had been overlooked. In the 1860s and 1870s Julia Margaret Cameron dressed friends and household members as biblical and Arthurian figures, and Victorian studios built moral allegories and genre scenes from posed models.

The approach became a major current from the late 1970s, as artists borrowed from cinema and advertising. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) cast the artist as heroines of films that never existed. Jeff Wall restages everyday incidents as large backlit transparencies, and Gregory Crewdson directs film crews to build eerie, twilit suburban scenes. Yasumasa Morimura inserts himself into famous paintings and film images. Look for controlled lighting, poses held a beat too long, and details placed to carry a story.