This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by spinfast3@earthlink.net. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/arts/design/06KIMM.html?ex=1055959394&ei=1&en=c15736808df5de9c
Interesting article in NY Times. JG spinfast3@earthlink.net ------------------
In an Unsullied Wonderland
June 6, 2003 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
In the photograph, a girl reclines on a divan. She is 8. Her eyes are shut. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting dress or nightgown that has come off one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.
The picture, like the girl, is beautiful: patterned fabric set off against skin, grays against white. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing. We stare at her, uneasily, through a century of Freudian analysis.
The photograph was taken in 1872 by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whom we see in another photograph, a self-portrait from three years later. He is seated in a leather easy chair. His head is propped against his hand, his eyes turned from the camera, heavy-lidded. He seems to be daydreaming. About what? We may have our suspicions when we look at the two photographs together.
But photography is a notoriously ambiguous medium. Untethered from their context, photographs tell us precious little about what we see in them. They are malleable artifacts, their meanings changing with time, depending on who is looking at them and when. This malleability is the source of their attraction and their resilience. A photograph is at least as much a looking glass as it is a window.
Although his pen name opened doors, as he desired, Dodgson was conflicted about his public identity as Lewis Carroll. To his friends and in every way aside from writing children's stories, which he never took seriously, he wished to be regarded as the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, a photographer, and in later years a novelist of serious literature. The anecdote is probably apocryphal, but Queen Victoria was supposedly nonplussed to receive "Euclid and His Modern Rivals" after she had asked the author for his next book.
Dodgson became rich on royalties so he enjoyed the benefits of his alter-ego's fame. But he felt burdened by Carroll, who in the public's eye overshadowed everything he did and, to posterity, distorted how he was perceived: a post-Freudian world inevitably came to see Dodgson through Carroll's looking glass, as a grown man with a disturbing fixation on little girls.
Douglas R. Nickel, the curator of the latest exhibition of Dodgson's photographs, now at the International Center of Photography, tries to extricate his subject from these circumstances, and in so doing joins a lively debate that has been heating up in recent years.
Carroll's traditional defenders still cultivate his image as a naïve, stammering, half-deaf, absent-minded professor, to counter the populist suspicions of pedophilia. But new scholarship has uncovered evidence of a healthy adult, a clergyman with a mature sexual appetite who wrote grown-up love poetry and who was recalled fondly by the girls he photographed when they became adults.
He was neither a sweet, celibate Oxford don nor a pedophile, by this account, but an urbane, socially ambitious man whose family, after he died, thought it wise and proper to keep quiet his engagements with women - some married, at least one his senior - to maintain his reputation, and theirs, during an era when being seen with someone else's wife would cause far more of a scandal than being seen with someone else's child. Dodgson pined not for Alice, according to this new scenario, but for Alice's mother.
Mr. Nickel's goal is not to save Dodgson's sexual reputation, which as an artistic matter is beside the point. His goal is to put Dodgson's pictures back in their context - to stress that we have lost touch with Victorian conventions, which Dodgson as a photographer largely obeyed. His photographs of children, like his photographs of adults, often entailed elaborate allegories and made-up narratives, as did the photographs of another Victorian, Julia Margaret Cameron, whom no one accuses of pedophilia. Dodgson's pictures look stagy and contrived today because 20th-century modernism has taught us that photography is a medium of truth, not artifice.
To reconsider Dodgson's pictures is therefore to think again about modernism's version of history. At the heart of Mr. Nickel's show is this idea, which has almost nothing to do with sexual impropriety: that modernism is an ideology on which we may now look back from a critical distance, as the modernists looked back on the Victorians.
I said "almost nothing to do with sexual impropriety" because the last century did not altogether disregard Dodgson's photographs, as it tended to disregard the work of other Victorian photographers who did not fit comfortably into the modernist canon. Dodgson's photographs remained in circulation as souvenirs of a famous children's-book writer whose private desires his books only surreptitiously seemed to suggest, while his pictures seemed to state these feelings outright.
Freudians had a field day interpreting his rabbit holes and tiny keys and his stories about Alice growing and shrinking, and they found confirmation for these fantastic hypotheses in photographs like the one of the girl asleep on the divan. These photographs were regarded as the private obsession of an amateur, not the work of an artist of professional ambitions.
Mr. Nickel points out that photography was, in fact, an occupation Dodgson pursued intensely and for many years; he took thousands of pictures, of which a few hundred survive, over more than two decades. His career as a photographer was longer than Cameron's or William Henry Fox Talbot's. He marketed and sold his pictures. He had serious artistic ambitions.
That he finally stopped taking photographs suggests that he thought he had run out of ideas: photography was about ideas to him, an artistic endeavor, not an obsession or a vice or a hobby or, as Vladimir Nabokov, who had no taste for Victoriana, once put it, a ploy for Dodgson to linger in a room with "sad, scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade."
The photographs in this show include boys as well as girls, adult portraits and allegorical scenes. The selection is tendentious - no nudes (there are only four by him anyway, despite what people seem to think); few pictures of famous people; few of the girl who inspired "Alice," Alice Liddell, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, Dodgson's boss.
The girl on the divan is Xie Kitchin, the daughter of another Oxford colleague, the Rev. George William Kitchin, a historian. Dodgson posed Xie in dozens of pictures, sometimes with her brothers. All four Kitchin children enact <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="82111">"St. George and the Dragon,"</object.title> Xie posing as the virgin princess in her wedding gown with her 6-year-old brother Brook Taylor, a paper helmet tottering on his tiny head, sitting atop a rocking horse and holding a very long lance pointed suggestively toward his sister's thighs.
Childhood has been an elastic concept through history. First it had to be invented and then it came to mean different things in different ages. It clearly meant something different to Victorians than it means to us now. For Dodgson to write that "a girl of about 12 is my ideal beauty of form" and also, "one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up" seems alarming today but was unexceptional in his time.
The Victorian cult of the child, connected with the cult of the woman, glorified purity and innocence. For Dodgson, as for Cameron and others, childhood represented, as Mr. Nickel puts it in his exhibition catalog, an "alternate reality, a metaphysical state of preknowledge that grants the young in his photographic work a license to reveal to adults something of their own moral condition."
"This," he adds, "is perhaps the greatest irony in the myth of Carroll-as-pedophile; Dodgson could pose his charges in adult roles, give them guns, daggers and exotic costumes, even portray them as odalisques and half-dressed waifs, because he and most of his audience believed so emphatically in their total insulation from the implications of such postures. These presentations do not so much underscore the latent sexuality of the child (as we post-Freudians would have it) as they do an obvious lack of it."
But could the Victorians really not see what seems plainly obvious to us in these pictures? The myth of Perseus rescuing Andromeda is linked with the story of St. George saving the princess. Dodgson also photographed "Andromeda," not with children but with two women, famous actresses of the day, Kate and Ellen Terry, as Andromeda and Perseus. Kate's arms, raised and bound with a silk cord, are held up by Ellen, who glares at the camera.
The women wear dresses. They pose against a brick porch with a cloth thrown haphazardly over it so that all the artifice remains transparent. There is no attempt at illusion.
Dodgson clearly expected his audience to know the myth and the actresses, and to ignore the stagecraft. The obvious modern comparison is Cindy Sherman, in whose photographs the sexual content is even more unambiguous than Dodgson's mild version of lesbian bondage. Like Dodgson, she presumes that viewers will bring their own imaginations to bear on her photographs.
But she operates from the opposite end of modernism, across a century of art. We are meant to register the transparent fakery of her props and masks and dolls and prosthetic limbs. To see Dodgson, through Sherman, as a photographer self-consciously playing off the medium's presumptive verisimilitude is an anachronism, even if it is now unavoidable.
Look again at the photograph of Ellen Terry as Perseus, glaring. The conventional view has it that Dodgson elicited an intensity and animation from children that he couldn't, or didn't care about, from adults. Another photograph, of three girls, Flora Rankin, Irene MacDonald and Mary Josephine MacDonald, in flowery dresses, shows Flora fixed on the camera, with a look that is somewhere between imperial and heartbroken. We read into it what we wish. The expression seems knowing and unsettling in a way that Ellen Terry's is not. It is a poignant look of innocence on the verge of being lost.
Or is this just our imagination?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/arts/design/06KIMM.html?ex=1055959394&ei=1&en=c15736808df5de9c
