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

Nickers great contribution is to recover the highly theatrical literary and artistic milieu from which the most controversial images arose. He navigates skillfully between the conventions of the day--such genres as "Oriental" costumed portraits and nude studies--and the deviations that make art. Both he and Taylor are scrupulous in conveying how the photographs would have looked to Dodgson's audience. The two most notorious examples are the six-year-old Alice Liddell as a provocative street urchin in The Beggar Maid (1858) and the hand-colored nude study of eight-year-old Evelyn Hatch (1879). These were based on common visual styles for representing children, and the nude study is pure greeting-card stuff, closer to kitsch than pornography. To bring home his point about context, Nickel designed the SFMOMA installation to resemble Dodgson's own Victorian rooms, with the prints lined up on picture rails in small galleries with wainscoting and colored walls. Quaint, perhaps; yet in the works of artists such as Gregory Crewdson, Cindy Sherman and Joel Peter Witkin, our own time begins to look more and more like that premodern photographic era.

Dodgson was an amateur, which at the time was a near synonym for "artist," as distinct from the commercial professional. He made the pictures he wanted, or that friends asked for, and gave copies to his sitters. Wakeling, editor of Dodgson's diaries, estimates that the artist took some 3,000 photographs 'between 1856 and 1880, when he gave up the practice (though he did continue to order additional prints). Beyond his writing and academic responsibilities, Dodgson seems to have devoted most of his time to photography. In order to live in college and enjoy the privileges of a don, he had to remain unmarried, so he had few domestic distractions. If he wasn't photographing, he was cataloguing and organizing his prints into 34 presentation albums, which he used as calling cards to solicit, and when necessary persuade, new sitters or their families. The SFMOMA exhibition's digital monitors allowed visitors to "leaf through" several such albums. In their book, Taylor and Wakeling reproduce pictures from four of the compilations, along with some solitary prints, all currently part of the Princeton University Library Collection. Nickel draws on images outside that group, and between the two volumes we have the full range of Dogdson's photographic world.

Problematic images formed only a tiny portion of this oeuvre. But like the Cheshire cat's disembodied smile, the Dodgson controversy won't go away. When I saw the exhibition at a second venue, the spare white gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cheshire cat was back, more vivid than ever. The bulk of the pictures on display in this rather clinical setting were of young girls, especially Alice Liddell, for whom Dodgson wrote the Alice books, and Xie Kitchin, a wan and willowy girl whom he transformed into a kind of Pre-Raphaelite icon. This might suggest that the problem is again one of contemporary sensibility, a combination of the emphasis of Nickel's selection and our impatience with anything that feels like antiquarianism. But Dodgson's diaries are, in fact, punctuated with tactical references to arranging the girls' sessions. And when he wasn't photographing prepubescent females, he spent as much time as he could socializing with them. As Nickel notes, there is an impersonality in his references to his "child-friends," as he tallies them up in his diaries. His two young muses notwithstanding, the little girls appear to have been almost interchangeable in his mind. And once they became women, Dodgson lost interest in them as companions and visual subjects. He even stopped photographing at least in part, it seems, because of a growing belief in the society around him that his practice verged on impropriety. People at Oxford were beginning to talk.