I decided to look back on tableaux photography because I believe that the final images from my project use some of the ideas used in tableaux photography, it is also one of my personal inspirations towards photography and why I created the project in the first place.

Tableaux photography is a style of photography where people are staged in a constructed environment and a pictorial narrative is conveyed often through a single image.

Tableaux comes from the french word ‘tableaux vivant’ which directly translated in English means ‘living picture’. Tableaux Vivant was very popular within the Victorian era, the term describes staged groups of artists models often using dramatic costumes, carefully posed, motionless without speaking and theatrically lit, recreating paintings ‘on stage’. In modern day photography we have interpreted tableaux photography as a style of photography where people are staged in a constructed environment, it is when you respond to a painting in the past and turn it into a photograph of your own. Therefore, as  this is how it is interpreted I will be making my own set up images based on a famous painting. Below is an example of Tableaux photography, as you can see, the top image is the image of The raft of Medusa, a very famous image. Tableaux photography has commonly been seen based around this image, also seen in the modern interpretation of the image. The modern image could also be allegorical since it does not convey the same literal meaning, however it has no meaning apart from being a funny but well crafted image.

Allegorical:

Allegorical is when an image has a less literal meaning than what is conveyed as it is only a fantasy of what real life is actually like. The word Allegory has the definition of  ‘a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.’ An example would be Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi (between 1475 and 1500). As seen below.

I have decided to focus on romanticism as one of the isms based around my images from all of the shoots.

Romanticism was a movement in the arts and literature which originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. In most areas romanticism was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities

In modern day it is seen that a romanticist image is a beautiful image, however in the 1800s it was seen as a painting with a strong meaning. An example of romanticism back in this age was the painting ‘The raft of the Medusa’. 

This painting was created in France by the chief early Romantic painters Baron Antoine Gros, who painted dramatic tableau’s of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and Théodore Géricault, whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in The Raft of the Medusa and in his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the movement around 1820. As a whole romanticism was seen as a vast movement that included many mediums to present. This was just one of the most famous paintings created during the movement.