Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: fascinating exchanges between two photographers a century apart
According to the National Portrait Gallery, this new exhibition pairing photographers from different centuries and continents is a “risk”. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) was a self-taught member of the Victorian elite who photographed family and friends, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The American prodigy Francesca Woodman (1958-81) focused principally upon herself, before she took her own life, at 22.
Cameron was almost 50 when she was given a camera, and, obviously, couldn’t have known about Woodman; there’s no evidence that Woodman, who was already producing extraordinarily mature photographs at 13, was aware of Cameron.
Yet, thanks to curator Magdalene Keaney’s flawless visual literacy (a quality with which, sadly, not every curator is blessed), this exhibition of more than 160 vintage prints – by turns tender and intelligent, and always exquisite – works. Its title adapts Woodman’s observation that photography could be a place “for the viewer to dream in”.
With considerable ingenuity and flair, the show juxtaposes images with common motifs. For instance, two children, photographed by Cameron in 1864, clutch a parasol; more than a century later, Woodman captured a figure crouching, in an interior, behind an inverted brolly. Emblem-like lilies feature in photographs by both artists. The polka-dot pattern of a dress worn by Woodman in a shot from 1976 picks up the design of wallpaper in Cameron’s adjacent Sadness (1864).
Sometimes, the counterpoint is especially subtle and brilliant. A photograph by Cameron of a black-clad model with downcast eyes and upward-pointing hands proves the perfect foil for a self-portrait from the late 1970s in which Woodman appears, dramatically, in what could be a widow’s weeds, with downward hands but a blazing stare.
Is such an approach, though satisfying visually, superficial? Far from it. Keaney discovers connections between the artists that feel kindred-spirit deep. A gorgeous wall of clustered prints establishes a shared interest in angels: both photographers used soft-focus effects to convey a sense of something beautiful and otherworldly, and, often, their eerie, seemingly-phantom-filled pictures appear to capture something numinous – including, yes, celestial beings soaring through the ether.
Cameron’s Daphne (Mary Pinnock) (1866-68) invokes the nymph from ancient Greek mythology whose fate was told, famously, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (pursued by Apollo, she was transformed into a laurel tree). Here, it introduces several mysterious and untitled images by Woodman from 1980 in which she wraps her wrists and forearms in a silver birch’s bark. The former enhances our understanding of the latter, which couldn’t be more Ovidian if they tried.
Cameron and Woodman, then, shared a sensibility: dreamy and intense, sophisticated, romantic – and tinged with melancholy. In other pleasing symmetries, both liked to use props, and to inscribe their prints with quotes as well as titles.
Moreover, Cameron is served well by Woodman, who makes her predecessor’s larger, sepia-toned photographs, often of drapery-clad maidens like living statuary, appear more contemporary than they might. Some of Cameron’s garlanded sylphs seem modern, like flower children at a festival.
Really, though, Woodman steals the show. Her delicate yet dynamic, mostly tiny, black-and-white, and hand-printed images – always crackling with tricksy, modernist experiments, often reimagining the female nude – are manifestly brilliant. With a medium-bending superpower, as if she were a sorcerer, Woodman could manipulate light to create startling quicksilver effects.
As gambles go, this “precarious undertaking”, as Keaney describes Portraits to Dream In, has paid off.
From March 21; information: npg.org.uk
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