Step into Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron’s dreamy pictures in London

For these conversant in the work of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron, it’s not instantly apparent why the Nationwide Portrait Gallery has introduced these two photographers collectively. Woodman’s artwork emerged through the rise of second-wave feminism and Submit-Minimalism, her photos haunted by the affect of contemporaries like Ana Mendieta and Deborah Turbeville. Cameron’s work, in the meantime, is distinctly Victorian. The delicate focus of her pictures evokes a closely Christian, English sensibility of female magnificence; her feminine sitters usually idealised as wives and moms. Spanning a century and continents aside, there isn’t any direct lineage between Cameron and Woodman’s photo-making – at the very least, not one Woodman ever straight references. 

Regardless of these disparities, ‘Portraits to Dream In’ boldly argues for a radical reassessment of every girl’s work. It’s Woodman from whom the present derives its title – pictures must be ‘locations for the viewer to dream in,’ she declares. Eschewing biographical and historicist custom, it’s exactly this dreamlike high quality to their images that curator Magdalene Keaney makes use of to attach their pictures; ethereal, spectral, lyrical. 

Each Cameron and Woodman imbue their photos with allusions to saints and Christianity. Cameron’s sepia portraiture is laden with Biblical symbolism; cherubs embracing, saints praying, and prophetesses wandering in cloaks. Her tableaus evoke a personal, virtually clandestine world inhabited solely by girls. The gaze is distinctly feminine and introspective, akin to the Pre-Raphaelites however with a quieter presence. Woodman’s Angels sequence likewise function prominently within the exhibition, maybe essentially the most putting of which (Untitled, c. 1977–78) exhibits a younger girl suspended from a doorway as if she had been being crucified, bathed in a burst of sunshine. 

Greek mythology is one other important affect in each girls’s work. In her unusually massive Caryatid sequence, Woodman’s girls embody architectural parts harking back to temple help figures. Towering over two metres tall, these monumental diazotype prints of headless girls, impressed by classical architectural sculptures, command consideration in a room suffused with the pinkish hues of twilight. This departure in scale and arresting presence contrasts sharply with Cameron’s draped figures in Teachings from the Elgin Marbles (1867), virtually diminished by comparability.

Some of the stark variations in Cameron and Woodman’s images are their topics. Notoriously, Cameron’s sitters included Robert Browning, Alice Liddell, Henry Taylor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Charles Darwin. Woodman, nonetheless, was usually the topic of her personal images, which she used to convey self-revelation and theatricality, difficult the restrictions of her medium to instil imagery with narrative and allegorical parts. She was drawn to the symbolic nature of the feminine nude and the tranquillity of pure settings, usually incorporating mirrors and vitrines to trace at metamorphosis and paradox inside her compositions. As a lot because the medium-format cameras and gelatin silver prints she used to create her photos, Woodman herself was an important a part of her creative methodology.