Two photographers who caught feelings beyond language
PORTRAITS TO DREAM IN Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron National Portrait Gallery, London, until June 16
IN THE OPENING SPACE of the National Portrait Gallery’s new show, Portraits to Dream In, two photographic portraits hang side by side. The first is by Julia Margaret Cameron, who in 1864 produced what she considered “My First Success”. Eight-yearold Annie Philpot, buttoned up in her winter coat, is posed in three-quarters. The aesthetic markers that would become synonymous with Cameron’s later work are all here: out-of-focus background, low depth of field, striking ways with light and shadow. Over the next fifteen years Cameron would use this dramatic chiaroscuro to turn little girls and their aunts into mythic gods, heroines and biblical characters: Guinevere, Mary Magdalene, Cupid.
The second photograph is from a century later. In 1972 Francesca Woodman produced what she later identified as her first important picture. In “Self-Portrait at Thirteen” the American schoolgirl photographed herself with her long hair obscuring her face, a gesture suggestive of both the effacement and disclosure of early adolescence. Light from a window strafes through the picture and, this time, it is the foreground that is out of focus. Like Cameron before her, Woodman was at the beginning of an abbreviated career of extraordinary picture-making. Over the next nine years she would turn herself and her models into a series of characters that, though unnamed, drew on the same mythological cast of characters as Cameron. This culminated in an extraordinary sequence of 1980, in which Woodman and her warm-blooded friends posed as caryatids, those statuesque stone women able to support an ancient Greek temple on their heads.
In Portraits to Dream In the curator Magdalene Keaney has set more than 160 monochrome prints by the two artists side by side, looking for continuities and resonances, but also for points of departure. The first and most obvious of these divergences concerns technology. Working in the infant days of photography, Cameron used a heavy wooden sliding box camera perched on a tripod, which required her sitters to hold still for five minutes. Woodman, by contrast, had a handheld medium-format camera that gave her pictures a flexible quality and allowed her models to leap and spin. Cameron’s prints are necessarily large, created from unwieldy glass plate negatives. Woodman’s gelatin silver prints are so small and intimate that you need to lean in to look, a discrepancy that the exhibition never quite manages to resolve.
Other matters, though, run strikingly smoothly through the 100 years that separate the two artists. (Cameron, obviously, had no inkling of Woodman’s work, but it seems likely that Woodman, an ardent Victorianist, knew all about Cameron’s). Neither woman had any
