Two eminent architects who have died this year offered very different solutions to the perennial question of how new buildings should be designed in the context of the old. I.M. Pei and William Whitfield may seem to have had little in common apart from advanced old age: Whitfield lived to be ninety-eight and Pei was a hundred and two. Born in Canton, but with a career spent largely in the United States, the internationally celebrated Pei crowned his career with the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, which opened in 2008. Whitfield was born in Britain, where he practised all his life, and his buildings were the sort that garner high praise from critics without ever making their creator’s name widely known.

Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 12th March–9th June by corey keller Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–75) was a prolific experimenter and adventurous advocate for photography’s rightful place among the fine arts. A painter and copyist by training, he took up photography in 1852 and from then on earned his keep as a portrait photographer. Within the art circles of Victorian Britain, his fame (or infamy, depending on the critic) derived largely from a monumental single photographic image composed from more than thirty separate negatives, entitled Two ways of life (Hope in repentance) (no.88; Fig.14). This allegory of the forked moral path faced by a young man in a rapidly industrialising society is a masterly example of Rejlander’s pioneering use of combination printing to create tableaux that marry the descriptive potency of photography with painterly themes and compositions.

 (no.88; Fig.14). This allegory of the forked moral path faced by a young man in a rapidly industrialising society is a masterly example of Rejlander’s pioneering use of combination printing to create tableaux that marry the descriptive potency of photography with painterly themes and compositions.