Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman pushed the boundaries of photography, and have been paired up in a major new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Tracy Calder takes a look
In 1868 a reviewer for The Photographic News (the forerunner to this magazine) described a set of exhibition prints made by Julia Margaret Cameron as ‘altogether repulsive’. It seems laughable now, knowing what we do about Cameron’s influence on the medium, but back then her ‘wilfully imperfect photography’ caused some critics to get seriously fired up. In her defence, photography was very much in its infancy when she was gifted a camera, and she never once claimed to be a master technician. Now, of course, every smudged fingerprint, unsightly scratch or blurry face is evidence of the human touch – something that’s sure to become more valuable in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
The photograph as a physical object has long fascinated artists, academics and historians, so it’s great to see more than 160 vintage prints from Cameron and Francesca Woodman on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Pairing artists who never actually met and who worked more than a century apart is not without its risks (we are constantly being asked to ‘explore the parallel paths of great artists’ or ‘consider the open-ended dialogue’ between individuals). Sometimes, the pairing falls flat: the link between styles is tenuous, the premise for the show is weak, or the notoriety of one artist threatens to overshadow the other, for example.
Thankfully, curator Magdalene Keaney and her team were willing to take this risk when they paired Cameron and Woodman up for Portraits to Dream In. The result is a well-balanced, thoroughly researched show that manages to celebrate the shared passions of two artists, while acknowledging their fundamental differences. Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to bounce backwards and forwards through time without getting too bogged down in biography. To achieve this, the pictures are arranged by theme, rather than a strict timeline. In some ways this makes it harder to trace developments in each artist’s work, but it’s a small price to pay for the clarity and sense of purpose it gives the show.
Biography vs creativity
There are other reasons why biography has been played down, as Keaney explains in the book that accompanies the show. ‘At times an emphasis on biography has obscured and constricted rather than revealed or expanded ways of experiencing and understanding both artists’ work,’ she argues. In the past, some critics have focused on Cameron’s social stand
