by Just over 100 years separate the creative lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, a Victorian pioneer in photographic portraiture, and a 20th-century American artist who produced expressive and mysterious self-portraits of the other. Although neither of them received the recognition they deserved in their lives, it seems at first glance that they are defined more by their differences than their similarities. Now, however, an ambitious exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together the work both photographers produced in their short but highly productive working lives.
Cameron (1815-79), who came from a privileged colonial background, came late to the medium, having been given a camera in 1863, aged 48. A self-taught photographer in an even older, male-dominated medium , she created her body. work in the last 15 years of her life. Woodman (1958-81) was educated at art school, from an artistic family: her father was a painter and photographer, and her mother was a potter. She became very interested in photography as a precocious teenager at a private boarding school, handprinting her first self-portrait in 1972, aged 13. .
Cameron’s and Woodman’s respective ways of working were to some extent defined by the technology available to them. Cameron used a distressed box camera mounted on a tripod and painstakingly created prints from glass plate negatives. Woodman used mostly relatively light medium format cameras and printed her small gelatin silver prints by hand in a darkroom. And yet, as this well-curated show demonstrates, the two shared certain distinctive preoccupations – most notably their embrace of post-production processes as a means of their relaxed imagination. As curator Magdalene Keaney said in her lucid catalog essay: “Neither was concerned with producing technically perfect prints, and darkroom manipulation was shared as a central aspect of creative image-making.”
Cameron’s angelic beings are rooted in Christian iconography and classical mythology. Woodman’s angelic self-estimations are all the more accurate
The subtitle of this exhibition, Portraits to Dream In, refers to their shared interest in portraiture as a means of imaginative experimentation and transformation. Often seen as a genre defined by its boundaries, Keaney notes that in her work it is a means of “a wide range of ideas related to picture-making, appearance, identity, self-expression, the muse, gender, archetypes” to explore. and storytelling”. We tend to think of these creative preoccupations as quintessentially modern – certainly more Woodman than Cameron – but they are present, albeit in a less dramatic way, in often idealized allegorical portraits. drawing on literature, myth and religious iconography.
The show begins with a pair of first portraits that each artist declared they were happy with. Cameron is a sketch of a young girl in half profile, created in 1864 and titled, with obvious satisfaction, Annie, my first success. It is strikingly different in tone from Cameron’s many portraits of cherubic young women, the girl’s side view and calm expression conveying an unadorned naturalness. Moreover, Woodman’s 13-year-old self-portrait seems almost post-modern, an indistinct study in gray in which her face is hidden by a mane of hair and her process literally and metaphorically preceded by the loose cable valve that extends from his hand to. bottom right foreground of frame in increasing blur. As earlier statements of intent go, they couldn’t be more different, even as each heralds the journeys to come.
The show has been structured around loose thematic headings, some self-explanatory – Picture Making, Nature and the Feminine, Models and Muses – and others reflecting the unlikely pair’s shared interest in ethereal material: The Dream Space, Doubling, Angels and Others Others. The creative dialogue that follows, across eras, styles, materials and approaches, is always fascinating, if sometimes a little thin, emphasizing the artists’ differences as well as their creative connections.
A case in point is the segment that addresses their shared fascination with the angel archetype. Cameron’s angelic beings are rooted in Christian iconography and classical mythology, whether it’s an elegantly dressed and beautiful angel mourning the tomb of Christ or an almost pre-Raphaelite Venus winging the infant Cupid. Woodman’s angelic self-projections are far more precise and anonymous, her wild animated body always in motion. In one image she soars with her arms folded beneath her wandering wings, sunlight streaming in from a large window into her spartan studio.
In one deliberately overexposed font, titled On Being an Angel, Woodman frames her curvaceous body from above, her mouth agape and her exposed torso bathed in white light. The sense of carnal ecstasy is somewhat muted by the mundaneness of the setting: the camera equipment on the bare floorboards in the background and the dark silhouette of a silhouette leaning against a bare wall. As with her more whimsical images, there is a hint of surrealism here; the sense that she is powerfully present as a guiding spirit, that she is incomprehensible as a subject: a shadowy figure, made indistinct and ignorant by her constant use of the self-portrait as a form of self-concealment.
Portraits to Dream In: Cameron’s startling portrait always surprises Iago (Studies from Italian) greatly disrupts the survey of images of ideal femininity and youthful innocence with its brooding intensity. In one room is a triptych of large-scale diazotype color prints made by Woodman towards the end of her life, in which she is in the form of a caryatid – a draped female statue that the ancient Greeks placed in their temples. They hover above the space like ghosts of the unrealized future, emphasizing the momentum of Woodman’s creativity and its sudden, terrifying termination.
There’s a lot to take in here in one look, but the intriguing pairing of two female pioneers is a quietly subversive way to explore their work anew, from a perspective that elevates and contrasts their imaginative strategies rather than their narratives respective lives. While the guiding presence of Julia Margaret Cameron is evident in all her portraits – her compositional skill, elaborate tableaus and allegorical resonance – Francesca Woodman is a more complex and shape-shifting author of her own mysteries. She once said: “You can’t see me from where I’m looking at myself.” As this creative pairing shows, it is.
• Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 16 June
