Album page with Poor Jo

In this album page, a street urchin seems to take cover from the photo-collage that crowds the sheet around him. He appears in a genre scene made around 1860 by Oscar Gustav Rejlander, a photographer better known for montages joining dozens of negatives into a seamless composition. What we see here, however, is a very different process of assembly, probably undertaken by George James Howard, a painter in Rejlander’s orbit. Anything but seamless, this page combines images from the popular press with little apparent logic, tracking Howard’s own idiosyncratic interests and activities. His haphazard assemblage of subjects reflects his era’s increasingly casual relationship to photographs, which were growing ever easier to reproduce and disseminate. The lone photographic print in an array of ink-and-paper reproductions, Rejlander’s work would itself enter mass circulation; his urchin made frequent cameos in the illustrated press, became the poster child for a welfare organization, and was likely pasted into other albums along the way.