Dodgson in wonderland: a traveling show, currently at New York's ICP, and two new books revive the question of intent behind the photographic work of Lewis Carroll - Photography - Biography

Art in America, June, 2003 by Lyle Rexer

We might ask of the author and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) what the hookah-smoking caterpillar asked of Alice: "Who are you?" And if a traveling exhibition currently at the International Center of Photography in New York, as well as two new books, bring us no closer to an answer, they certainly present the evidence in all its mysterious and eccentric beauty.

The question of identity preoccupied artists during Dodgson's lifetime (1836-1898), an era that culminated in the triumph of middle-class propriety. The caterpillar's question lurks in Pip's obscure parentage in Great Expectations, in Daniel Deronda's hidden Jewishness in the eponymous George Eliot novel and, especially, in Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, a jailhouse confession that turns identity into a hall of mirrors. In his writing and photographs, Dodgson, too, flirted with the notion of identity as multiple and fluid, and like Wilde he was damaged by an increasing external prudery that sought to suppress the sexual aspect of such questions.

Who was Dodgson? In Lewis Carroll, Photographer, Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling offer essentially the same portrait presented by photography curator Douglas R. Nickel in Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll, the catalogue accompanying his show of 72 mostly vintage albumen prints organized at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last fall. (Wakeling supplies technical commentary on the plates in both densely illustrated books, including--in the volume with Taylor--a register of all known Carroll images.) Here Dodgson emerges as a distinguished mathematician, the author of the celebrated Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and an Oxford don, who lived his entire adult life, in celibacy, it appears, in the confines of Christ Church College. Above all, he was a gifted, obsessive and dedicated photographer, one of the best that the medium's first century produced.

The quiet scholar was emphatically not, according to these authors, a pedophile. Deeply troubled by a sense of sin and inadequacy, yes, but not a man who would propose marriage to or desire to have sex with children, as has been asserted by a number of commentators, especially Morton Cohen in his 1996 biography. Individually, both Nickel and Taylor, an independent photographic historian, seek to absolve Dodgson of these sordid charges in order to claim him as an artist and rescue his work for unclouded appreciation. They argue persuasively that modern commentators' lack of familiarity with Victorian photographic conventions (or, in the case of novelist Vladimir Nabokov, outright hostility to the period) has caused them to impute dark motives where there should be only sunshine. Taylor is best on Dodgson's life and relations. His Dodgson comes across as a sort of bachelor uncle who sought to embody in his art a widely held sentimental Victorian ideal of childhood. Nickel presses the case more relentlessly, glossing the iconography of particular tableaux, including the weird and wonderful Xie, Herbert, Hugh and Brook Kitchin in "St. George and the Dragon," 1875 (with its hobbyhorse and four children acting out the legend), and itemizing Dodgson's recurrent preoccupations, such as family portraits, exotic motifs and the child-as-dreamer. Thus we gain a comprehensible, even appealing Dodgson but to my mind lose a figure as contradictory and compelling as the age he exemplified.

Dodgson was born just three years before the "official" announcement of photography by competitors Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, and grew up with the medium. He appears to have begun making pictures for the same reason Talbot did--frustration with his limited ability to draw. Yet the chemical, impersonal, scientific nature of the process deeply appealed to him. The assumption that mastery of a new technical process might yield art is one Dodgson shares with Talbot, John Herschel, Samuel Morse and many other pioneers of photography. They thought they had "discovered" a new art of fixing a shadow when in fact they created it as they went. Dodgson's chosen medium of collodion solution on glass plate was invented in 1851, only a few years before he began to make photographs. He learned the process the hard way, by trial and error, fighting against England's erratic sunlight and temperamental weather, coping with unreliable chemicals, and corresponding with other photographers. He began by making both the negatives and the albumen-coated prints but soon turned the latter task over to professional printers. Pouring the plates and developing the negatives--not to mention arranging the sessions and conceiving the approach--proved more than enough trouble.

Quite apart from the ambiguous nature of some of his little-girl shots, Dodgson's photographic reputation suffered total eclipse during much of the 20th century because he approached the camera as a fabricating device and the depicted self as a series of fantasies. Taking their cue from Pre-Raphaelite painters, Dodgson and other Victorian photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Oscar Rejlander embraced the allegorical, the antique, the theatrical. But after World War I, the modernist esthetic of purified, nonanecdotal photographic vision banished such stuff as frivolous and derivative.