I’m pleased to hear that the Wolverhampton photographer Oscar Rejlander has a major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, of all places. It appears to have travelled from its 2018 debut in Canada, so let’s hope it eventually crosses the Atlantic and reaches Birmingham. His work is far more human and warm than the cold and aloof psychotica made by Julia Margaret Cameron, with whom he’s commonly compared, and it should be a popular show.

“Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, on view 12th March – 9th June 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles. … The exhibition features 150 photographs”

“Mary Constable and Her Brother”, 1866.

“The Scholar’s Mate”, c. 1855 exhibited 1856. The governess-tutor appears pleased and amused that her clever girl scholar is about two moves from checkmating her brother at a game of chess, and she seems to be quietly warning the girl to remain ladylike about it and not to gloat and snook when she wins. (Boys were commonly dressed as girls until they were abruptly “breeched” into trousers, in those days, thus one assumes she’s playing her brother even though he wears skirts).

One wonders if his pictures titled “Wolverhampton Fair” and “The Fortune Teller”, of the same 1855 date, survived. Also how many other Wolverhampton pictures have survived. He spent about 15 years in Wolverhampton before fame hit. He’s said to have employed the fairground sideshow girls of Wolverhampton as models (“Madame Wharton’s Pose Plastique Troupe”), which probably added to the scandal around his famous breakthrough pictures known as Two Ways of Life.

The new show is billed as “the first major retrospective on Rejlander”, and there’s a sumptuous Yale University Press book to accompany it. Which might make the West Midlands curators pause for thought, about why we couldn’t have got there first and are instead being beaten to a major show on ‘the father of art photography’ by distant Canada and Los Angeles.