Rejlander was also accused of using prostitutes as models, although Rejlander categorically denied this and no proof was ever offered. The image's partial nudity, which showed real women as they actually appeared and not the idealised forms then common in Victorian art, was deemed 'indecent' by some. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows a man being lured to paths of vice or virtue by good and bad angels. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks. In 1856 he made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. Rejlander participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. The Two Ways of Life, a moralistic photo montage of Rejlanders own work, 1857. Robinson, the immediate successor to Rejlander, who was also for many years a rival in seeking public applause for genre photography, calls the foregoing 'wonderful pictures of nude children.'" Thus one speaks of his undraped children as being as 'beautiful as those of Della Robbia, Flamingo, and Raphael.' Mr. Like Dodgson, Rejlander's work included many pictures of "undraped" children: "The remarks of his contemporaries bear witness to both his attainments and to the influence which he exercised. Rejlander later created one of the best known and most revealing portraits of Dodgson. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander's work and corresponded with him on technical matters.
Rejlander, of Wolverhampton" it suggests that by 1854 he was experimenting with combination printing from several negatives. He had articles feature in the Wolverhampton Chronicle newspaper, on 15 November 1854 an article called "Improvement in Calotypes, by Mr. Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing, which he did not invent however, he created more elaborate and convincing composite photographs than any prior photographer. Rejlander also produced nude studies, mainly for use as studies by painters, and later revealed that his early work was made with the aid of a local troupe of theatrical performers. In the early 1850s he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London, and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. In the 1850s he abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve. In the 1830s, he relocated to England, initially settling in Lincoln, England. During his youth, his family moved to the Swedish-speaking community in Rauma, Grand Duchy of Finland (then part of Russia). He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer.
According to his naturalisation papers, Rejlander was born in Stockholm on 19 October 1813.