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

What was Dodgson seeking in his subjects? According to Taylor, innocence, pure and simple. According to Nickel, the idea of innocence. Taylor deems any other theories "fruitless speculation." Yet this innocence is of a complicated sort. As UCLA scholar James Kincaid has argued, for the Victorians innocence itself became irresistibly desirable because it was socially constructed as "other" and better than sexualized adulthood. So a more convincing analysis might be that Dodgson transferred a strong adult sexual longing, which was realizable but dangerous, given his economic situation, to subjects that could never fulfill it.

Beyond the intense feelings provoked by this unavailable otherness, something else makes Dodgson's best images deeply engrossing. Alice Liddell, Irene MacDonald and May Barker betray a profound knowingness. It may be the knowingness not of incipient sexuality, as some commentators have argued, but rather of being regarded by a camera. The girls appear aware that, in front of the friendly man's machine, they must compose an answer to the caterpillar's question. Dodgson made a game of the sessions, so the girls may be play-acting; but the lens confers an inescapable awareness of separateness, bound up with seeing and being seen. In the juvenescence of what Emerson called "an ocular age," before standing in front of a camera became commonplace, Dodgson recorded innocence at the moment of its loss to budding self-consciousness, and therein resides the true poignancy of these pictures.

"Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll" was curated by Douglas R. Nickel for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it premiered [Aug. 3-Nov. 10, 2002] before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston [Feb. 22-May 19, 2003]. The show is currently on view at the International Center of Photography, New York [June 16-Sep. 7], and will later appear at the Art Institute of Chicago [Oct. 11, 2003-Jan. 11, 2004]. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Yale University Press in association with SFMOMA 2002; 172 pages, $39.95. Also discussed above is Lewis Carroll, Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums, by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling, Princeton University Press, 2002; 304 pages, $49.95.

Lyle Rexer is the author of Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (Abrams, 2002).

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