Sometimes tableau photography is called "staged photography.“ The staged picture draws on the traditions and conventions of either the theatre or painting.

Tableau Photography – is French for ‘living picture.’ The term describes a group of actors or artists, carefully posed and theatrically lit. Tableau vivant was an approach to picture-making used by the early pioneers of fine art photography in the 1840s.

Raphael, School of Athens

Oscar Rejlander

Tom Hunter – “The work is extreme, but then so are many of the paintings in The National Gallery, and Hunter firmly points out that non-contemporary art played with the same age-old themes of human experience and life.” BBC

staged or constructed

Creating a narrativechoreographed and directed

Can rely heavily on image manipulation

Contemporary TableauCompositional elements of story telling gained from 18th & 19th figurative painting

Storytelling referenced from fables, modern myths and other art forms

Tom Hunter – He photographs the people and places of his local community in Hackney. He draws his inspiration and composition from tradition paintings. His photographs are re-constructions of headlines he finds in his local paper ‘The Hackney Gazette.’

Hunter quotes “ I'm re-enacting scenes from every day life, which signify what's going on around us in today's society."

Jeff Wall – Canadian artist is widely recognised for his large dynamic transparencies mounted on light boxes. The sense of scale comes from Wall’s fascination with tradition painting and cinematography. A number of the pictures are photomontages , combinations of different negatives digitally interwoven to create engaging and intriguing narratives .

Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet's masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. In Manet's painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure.

Jeff Wall – “His constructed images employ the latest sophisticated technology in the creation of compelling tableaux, which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-century history painting. ”

Gregory Crewdson - An American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighbourhoods.

Gregory Crewdson - “The artist has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that restriction into a unique strength.”

Joel Peter Witkin – “His complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect.”

Théodore Géricault, The Raft Of The Medusa

Witkin deliberately references famous paintings in order to exalt his subjects by setting them in a "high-art" context, sometimes scratching or yellowing his pieces to make them appear old.

Joel Peter Witkin – Witkin deliberately references famous paintings in order to exalt his subjects by setting them in a "high-art" context, sometimes scratching or yellowing his pieces to make them appear old. Witkin below imitates the painting by Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas

Hiroshi Sugimoto – The Music Lesson (1999) elaborates on the connection between painting and photography. It depicts a wax re-creation of Vermeer’s painting The Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), 1662–1664, which was thought to have been created with the aid of a camera obscura.

Hiroshi Sugimoto – Sugimoto took some wax models from Madame Tussaud’s of Henry VIII and his six wives and Sugimoto painstakingly “remade” them to look like the original paintings from which they were modelled by isolating them from their surroundings in the wax gallery and employing lighting techniques similar to those that the painters might have used.

Sam Taylor-Wood – Contemporary artist who works in video, photography and film. She is a member of the young British Artist group. She has borrowed compositions from Michelango, Pieta and Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis’ Death of Chatterton.

Sam Taylor-Wood – “Entwining aspects of her won life in her staged photographs, like using her friends, she plays the role of a contemporary court painter, portraying an artistic and social elite of which she is part.” C. Cotton

Philip-Lorca diCorcia – 'It might be said that twilight is a muddled form of clarity. The warm glow that suffuses the ' golden hour' in Los Angeles acts to filter the grim realities, the outright lies, the self-deceptions, which allow Hollywood, and by extension, America to flourish. 'Twilight' provides the rose-coloured glasses that make it possible to see out but not see in.'

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Cindy Sherman – Sherman uses herself as a vehicle for commentary on a variety of issues of the modern world: the role of the woman, the role of the artist and many more. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.

Thomas Demand – “…the works make us less an audience looking onto an empty stage and more investigators of how little of a physical subject, and how much of the photographic approach, we need in order to start the process of imagining meaning and narrative.” C. Cotton

Wang Qingsong – “...his photographs subvert images drawn from popular culture, classical art and religion to attack consumerism. His colours are primary, strong and almost hyper-real, with details and in-jokes packed into the bigger picture; the overall effect is often highly kitsch, with distinct overtones of both Buddhist and Hindu iconography.”

Yinka Shonibare – Shonibare’s art plays imaginatively with stereotypes about race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality in order to deconstruct these concepts and show that they are “manufactured.” His re-creations include Diary of a Victorian Dandy, a suite of large photographs based on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, in which he portrays the Victorian dandy.

“Shonibare's work has always sought to make visible the cultural influences of colonisation, not just upon those who have been colonised, but also upon the colonisers. He undermines the assumption of a one-way 'civilising' influence, often in playful ways.” Okwui Enwezor