I feel that photographs can either document and record reality, or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in… Francesca Woodman, 1980
I thought Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958 – 1981) an unlikely pairing for an exhibition. ‘Portraits to Dream In’ at the National Portrait Gallery proved me wrong.
Their work is separated by more than a hundred years and there are, indeed, significant differences to confuse a connection. Cameron’s work is: still; proper (in the sense of her Victorian times); marries a cast of subjects, characters and ideas, often hiding individual personalities; and was innovative when photography was a new medium. In contrast, Woodman’s work is: dynamic; sensuous; focuses largely on herself; and faces the burden of photographic history in attempting to create something new. Cameron’s women are complicated, but not themselves; Woodman and her models have a complex femininity and are undoubtedly themselves. Cameron reveals little about her life; Woodman’s work is often diaristic.
The curator, Magdalene Keaney, using speculation and imagination, has sought to make a virtue of the differences and illuminate both bodies of work through comparison and by drawing out similarities.
Both artists planned their work meticulously, though you might not think so looking at Woodman’s free-flowing images. Cameron uses soft focus for effect; blurred movement is central to Woodman’s work. They both use mirroring or doubling of subjects in their compositions. Both were influenced in the images they made through their knowledge of art, literature and legends, Cameron most overtly in her presentation of figures from fiction and mythology. Both artists depict angels, if Cameron’s are bound while Woodman’s are free in a dream world, both invoke celestial beings and are rooted in Christian iconography. The curator draws out other stylistic similarities. Crucially, the exhibition shows how both ‘combine photography’s objective capacity with its poetic possibilities’. They expanded what the photograph could be: Cameron, a way of exploring character through formal portraits; Woodman, a surreal and conceptual exploration of self and sexuality.
This is reinforced by the encounter with original prints, albums and notebooks – the physical manifestations of photography with fetish like qualities that bring the photographers themselves within metaphorical touching distance. The prints speak in ways denied to reproductions: Iago – study from an Italian has never looked so unknowably imposing; and Untitled 1977 (from the Angels series) never so tragic in Woodman’s Icarus flight, knowing what we do of her fate. And among the prints, many revelations, Cameron’s Zoe/Maid of Athens, 1866 and Woodman’s caryatids, to give just two examples. All this and much more is available in the exemplary publication accompanying the exhibition.
The curator admits that, in this exhibition, nothing is definitive, it is subjective and open to interpretation, with all the risk that that implies. In the end it provokes an important but unanswerable question for me. Cameron did all that she was ever going to in photography; where might Woodman have taken flight to?
…your eye can best detect & your imagination conceive all that is to be done & is still left undone. Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864