Dreaming in Pictures: Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll’s children’s books—especially Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871)—are widely known and celebrated. Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll, at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street from June 6 through August 31, 2003, makes a new argument for Carroll’s importance as a photographer. This exhibition of vintage albumen prints from the 1850’s through the 1870’s organized by Douglas R. Nickel, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the first comprehensive American presentation of Lewis Carroll’s remarkable photographic work in fifty years.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics lecturer. He bought his first camera in 1856, the year he invented his pseudonym, and pursued photography in tandem with his writing and academic career. Dodgson’s fame as an author has impeded previous discussions of his photographic interests, with his images having been cast as hobbyist creations rather than serious works of art. Dreaming in Pictures is the first exhibition to offer a critical assessment of his photographs from an art-historical perspective, revealing him as a uniquely talented visual artist.

The 72 images featured in the exhibition focus on Dodgson’s pictures of people, including enigmatic portraits of children—perhaps his favorite subject—and tableaux photographs. The latter, based on the tableaux vivants popular in the 19th century, involved costumed sitters posing in historical and allegorical scenes and described narratives familiar to a Victorian audience. The assembled works—mostly rare vintage prints drawn from a number of important public and private collections—demonstrate Dodgson’s conception of the photograph as private theater. According to Nickel, "Carroll's photographs show the workings of his unique intelligence, underscoring his literary concerns with fantasy, dreaming, childhood innocence, and the power of the imagination, but they also illustrate a strain of Victorian photography that has been largely ignored by or suppressed in official histories of the medium. This exhibition offers the opportunity to examine both the individual and his times."

Dodgson was raised in the countryside of Yorkshire, north of London, and moved to Oxford to attend Christ Church College in 1851. Following brilliant achievement in mathematics as an undergraduate, he was made a fellow and mathematics lecturer of the college in 1856. Early in Dodgson’s academic career, photography became his great passion. With ever increasing seriousness, he established successively more elaborate and spacious studios, ultimately devoting more than 24 years to the medium and generating approximately 3,000 images.

Dreaming in Pictures includes contextual material to help contemporary audiences understand how photography was displayed and understood in Carroll’s day. In Victorian times, one of the primary vehicles for presenting photographs was the album. Carroll is believed to have assembled approximately 34 of these during his career, using them as portable exhibitions of his photographic talent. To encourage a better understanding of this nineteenth-century practice, a computer program created for this exhibition will allow visitors to leaf through "virtual albums"—electronic facsimiles of Carroll's originals. Using touch-screen monitors, viewers will be able to turn the pages of these albums and see over 100 of Carroll’s images.

Publication/Tour Dreaming in Pictures premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago following ICP’s presentation. It is accompanied by a major new study, Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll (2002), co-published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press. This 172-page book features an essay by Douglas R. Nickel, annotated plate descriptions by Carroll expert Edward Wakeling, and 95 duotone illustrations. The plate section includes all 72 works in the exhibition.

Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by John Jago Trelawney in memory of his aunt, Sallie Benfield. Pressetext

Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll