Legend has it that Julia Margaret Cameron’s final phrase, as she lay on her deathbed on a tea property in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1879, was “magnificence”. Her model of magnificence was considerably classical and consistent with the pre-Raphaelite beliefs of her period: pious, pure and white – lengthy, wavy hair, flower crowns and diaphanous clothes. She turned an knowledgeable at preserving this imaginative and prescient, utilizing the sliding field digicam she acquired as a present aged 49 to grasp each the moist collodian course of, the place a chunk of glass is coated with collodian and uncovered, and albumen printing – coating paper with egg white to present a sharper, glossier impact.
An enormous assortment of Cameron’s classic prints are proven alongside items by the enigmatic American artist Francesca Woodman within the Nationwide Portrait Gallery’s Portraits to Dream In. Woodman, working from the Seventies, shared an identical predilection for a sure type of magnificence, extra attractive, although nonetheless demure – each she and Cameron inherited, maybe, a means of seeing the world from their inventive, cultured households and privileged upbringings. In her self-portraits, made when Woodman was nonetheless a teen (her earliest work, included right here, was taken on the tender age of 13) present a physique nonetheless working itself out, inside area. Time reveals itself within the particulars – the identical pair of black Mary Jane footwear recurs in a number of footage; Woodman, like Cameron, produced her physique of labor in lower than 15 years. Neither was very effectively revered whereas they have been alive – however their legacy has lengthy outlived them and each have been phenomenally influential.
Although Woodman labored a century after Cameron and on one other continent, the parallels between the 2 are astonishing. They share, for first occasion, visible quirks – the exhibition pairs images by every that use umbrellas as props. Additionally they shared a love of role-play and energy dynamics: in a theatrical portrait by Cameron, she recreates a scene from her buddy Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, casting a buddy and her husband as Merlin and Vivien for the time being the magician submits to the villain of Camelot – a searing satire of male weak spot and vainness within the face of female youth and sweetness.
Subsequent to this picture is a playful sequence of photos by Woodman, taken with Charles Moccio, a life mannequin at Rhode Island College of Design the place Woodman was a scholar within the late 70s. Woodman comes out and in of the body, clothed and nude; Moccio laughs and takes on varied submissive poses – till lastly he seems collapsed in a nook, clutching a sheet of glass that presses towards his portly flesh. Right here the sides of their play darken all of a sudden. A caption scrawled in pencil by Woodman: “Generally issues appear very darkish. Charlie had a coronary heart assault. I hope issues get higher for him.” It reads as a warning as a lot as a sombre reflection.
Each Cameron and Woodman are drawn to drama – particularly the hyperbole of classical, mythological and biblical representations of femininity. A whole part of the exhibition brings collectively works from Woodman’s Angels sequence, photographed in Rome in 1977, the place the artist leaps into the air in entrance of a pair of billowing white sheets strung up within the window of an industrial warehouse, to present the impact of a seraph urbanite, alongside Cameron’s sweet-cheeked cherubim – beatific portraits of typically truculent Victorian youngsters taken within the 1870s.
Cameron was happy with her technical triumphs – she declared in her titles when she had successful or a favorite work. Among the many spectacular and extra experimental works of Woodman’s within the exhibition are a set of her Caryatid items – big diazotype prints during which she casts herself and feminine mates as carved feminine figures present in historic Greek temples. Purplish and engulfing the area, they create an atmosphere of huge feminine power that contrasts with Woodman’s normal, tiny sq. gelatin prints.
An additional thematic part considers the working situations of each artists: Cameron moved from a portrait studio on the V&A, to make most of her work in a cleared-out rooster coop in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. (When you’re questioning concerning the destiny of the animals, Cameron wrote: “The hens have been liberated, I hope and consider not eaten.”) Woodman is thought for the ominous, industrial interiors she made for a lot of of her self-portraits – stripped wood flooring and huge home windows, you’ll be able to’t take a look at them now and never consider her suicide in 1981, aged 22. Each additionally photographed outside, in search of a connection to nature. Two images of Woodman’s taken in Antella, Tuscany in 1978, are thrilling – the ruins of a constructing punch holes within the sky; in one other her physique is overwhelmed by a tangled mass that seems to return down from above. They’re paying homage to Graciela Iturbide’s supernatural photographs of Mexico of the identical time. These are glimpses of the artist Woodman may need develop into.
It is usually a reduction from the onslaught of magnificence, that after a time turns into insistent and obsessive on this exhibition. The prints themselves are staggering, however every artist’s pursuit and rehashing of what now appear drained concepts of very best female magnificence turns into tiring. Neither artist mirrored the world or their time – these portraits are private effigies, fuzzy facisimiles of female magnificence as they noticed and skilled it.
Smoky, hazy image after image of chimerical ladies, the present begins to depart you within the light-headed reverie it guarantees. Then it ends in a room bluntly referred to as Males – a few of Cameron’s most celebrated portraits, and a few of Woodman’s least identified. This room is surprisingly welcome, an opportunity to scrutinise and topic these male figures – mates, lovers and acquaintances of the artists – to the general public gaze.
Right here each appear to interrupt away from the tropes and traditions of portraiture, too; Cameron and Woodman set up their very own language for wanting right here. The portraits of males, conversely, recommend we’re all held again by the best way we take a look at ladies and what we search for in them.
Because the title invitations – these are portraits we’re imagined to dream in; to get misplaced after which possibly discover ourselves in. However like nocturnal apparitions, the pictures light quick from my thoughts once I left the gallery. I used to be left with a slight irritation of being woken up and having a woozy feeling of being wrongfooted.
