Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer.

Photography

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography; first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey and art photography pioneer Oscar Rejlander.

Related Topics:
1856 - Photography - Reginald Southey - Oscar Rejlander

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Dodgson soon excelled at the art, and it became an expression of his very personal inner philosophy; a belief in the divinity of what he called beauty, by which he seemed to mean a state of moral or aesthetic or physical perfection. He found this divine beauty not simply in the magic of theatre, but in the poetry of words, in a mathematical formula and perhaps supremely, in the human form; in the body-images that moved him.

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When he took up photography he sought with his own representations to combine the ideals of freedom and beauty into the innocence of Eden, where the human body and human contact could be enjoyed without shame. In his middle age, he was to re-form this philosophy into the pursuit of beauty as a state of Grace, a means of retrieving lost innocence. This, along with his lifelong passion for the theatre, was to bring him into confrontation with Victorian morality and his own family's High Church beliefs. As his main biographer Morton Cohen noted... "He rejected outright the Calvinist principle of original sin and replaced it with the notion of inborn divinity."

Related Topics:
Eden - Middle age - Victorian morality

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The definitive work on his photography (Roger Taylor's Lewis Carroll, Photographer (2002) exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. However it should be noted that less than a third of his original portfolio has survived (see below). His favourite girl model was Alexandra Kitchin ("Xie"), whom he photographed around fifty times from the age of four until the age of about 16. In 1880 he was striving to be allowed to photograph the 16 year old Xie in 'bathing dress', but was not allowed this liberty. Most of his girl subjects would write their name on the corner of the print in coloured ink. It's assumed that Dodgson either destroyed or returned the nude photographs to the families of the girls he had photographed. They were long presumed lost, but six nudes have since surfaced, four of which have been published and another two of which little is known. Dodgson's practice of photographing or sketching nude girls has added to speculation that he was a paedophile (see below). There is a clear difference between Dodgson's girls and depictions by other Victorian artists; in almost all of his solo portraits of girls they are depicted unburdened by the heavy weight of Victorian symbolism, and are simply and strongly themselves.

Related Topics:
Alexandra Kitchin - Paedophile

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He also found photography to be a useful entré into higher social circles. Once he had a studio of his own, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He also made some landscapes and anatomy studies.

Related Topics:
John Everett Millais - Ellen Terry - Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Julia Margaret Cameron - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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Dodgson abruptly ceased to photograph in 1880. Over 24 years he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio at the top of Tom Quad, and created around 3,000 images. Less than 1000 have survived time and deliberate destruction. He spent several hours each day creating a diary detailing the circumstances surrounding the making of each photograph, but this register was later destroyed.

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With the advent of Modernism tastes changed, and his photography became forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. He is now considered one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers.

Related Topics:
Modernism - Art photographers

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