by Legend has it that Julia Margaret Cameron’s last words, as she lay on her deathbed on a tea estate in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1879, were “beauty”. Her version of beauty was somewhat classical and in line with the pre-Raphaelite ideals of her era: pious, pure and white – long, wavy hair, flower crowns and diaphanous dresses. She became an expert at preserving this vision, using the slide box camera she received as a gift at the age of 49 to master the wet collodion process, where a piece of glass is coated with collodian and exposed, and albumen printing – paper coated with egg white. to give a sharper and brighter effect.
A large collection of Cameron’s vintage prints are displayed alongside pieces by the enigmatic American artist Francesca Woodman in Portraits to Dream In the National Portrait Gallery. Woodman, working from the 1970s, shared a sense of a certain, sexier, though still contemptible, kind of beauty – she and Cameron, perhaps, managed to see a way of seeing the world from their artistic, cultural families and their privileged children. Her self-portraits, made when Woodman was still a teenager (her earliest work, included here, was taken at the tender age of 13) show a body that is still working out, within space. Time reveals itself in the details – the same pair of black Mary Jane shoes reappears in several pictures; Woodman, like Cameron, completed her body of work in less than 15 years. Neither was highly regarded when they were alive – but their legacies are long gone and both were very influential.
Although Woodman worked a century after Cameron and on another continent, the similarities between the two are surprising. They share, first of all, visual quirks – the exhibition pair of photographs of each using umbrellas as props. They also shared a love of role-playing and power dynamics: in a theatrical portrait of Cameron, she recreates a scene from her friend Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, casting her friend and her husband as Merlin and Vivien at the moment the magician. surrenders to the villain of Camelot – a satire of male weakness and magic in the light of feminine youth and beauty.
Next to this image is a fun series of images by Woodman, taken with Charles Moccio, a life model at the Rhode Island School of Design where Woodman was a student in the late 70s. Woodman comes in and out of the frame, clothed and nude; Moccio laughs and takes various comforting things – until he appears to be cornered, clutching a sheet of glass which he presses against his portly flesh. Here the edges of their play suddenly darken. Caption scrawled in pencil by Woodman: “Sometimes things seem very dark. Charlie had a heart attack. I hope things get better for him.” It reads as a warning as much as a sombre reflection.
Both Cameron and Woodman are drawn to drama – especially the hyperbole of classical, mythological and biblical representations of the feminine. A whole section of the exhibition brings together works from the series Woodman’s Angels, taken in Rome in 1977, where the artist jumps into the air in front of a pair of white sheets that have been thrown up in the window of an industrial warehouse, to give the effect. of an urbanite seraph, alongside Cameron’s sweet cherubim – beautiful portraits of Victorian children taken at times truculent in the 1870s.
Cameron was proud of her technical prowess – she announced in her titles when she had succeeded or had succeeded in her favorite work. Among Woodman’s more impressive and experimental works in the exhibition is a collection of her Caryatid pieces – giant diazotype prints in which she casts herself and female friends as carved female figures found in ancient Greek temples. Coloring and enveloping the space, they create an environment of great female energy that contrasts with Woodman’s usual tiny gelatin prints.
Another thematic section considers the working conditions of the two artists: Cameron moved from a portrait studio at the V&A, to do most of her work in a cleaned-up chicken coop in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. (If you’re wondering about the fate of the animals, Cameron wrote: “The chickens were freed, I hope and believe they don’t eat them.”) Woodman is known for her ominous, industrial interiors for many of her self-portraits – stripped wooden floors and huge windows, you can’t look at them now and not think about her suicide in 1981, aged 22. Both of them also photographed outdoors, trying to connect with nature. Two photographs of Woodman taken in Antella, Tuscany in 1978 are thrilling – the ruins of a building with a hole punched in the sky; in another her body is engulfed by a tangled mass that descends from above. They are reminiscent of Graciela Iturbide’s supernatural shots of Mexico of the same time. Here is a glimpse of the artist Woodman could have been.
It is also a relief from the onslaught of beauty, which becomes intense and obsessive after a while in this exhibition. The prints themselves are over the top, but every artist now becomes a chaser and re-arrangement of tired ideas of ideal feminine beauty. Neither artist represented the world or their time – these portraits are personal images, vague models of feminine beauty as they saw and experienced it.
Smoky, hazy picture after picture of chimerical women, the show begins to leave you in the light-headed reverie it promises. Then it ends in a room known as Fragmentary Men – some of Cameron’s most famous portraits, and some of Woodman’s least known. This room is very welcome, an opportunity to examine and present these male figures – friends, lovers and acquaintances of the artists – to the public.
Both also seem to be breaking away from the tropes and traditions of portraiture; Cameron and Woodman establish their own language to look at here. On the other hand, the portraits of men suggest that we are all held back by the way we look at women and what we look for in them.
As the title suggests – these are portraits in which we are to dream; get lost and then maybe find ourselves in. But like nocturnal weapons, the images quickly disappeared from my mind when I left the gallery. Waking up left me slightly irritated and with a horrible feeling that I was wrong.
