Legend has it that as Julia Margaret Cameron lay dying on a tea estate in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1879, her last words were “beauty.” Her version of beauty was somewhat classical and in line with the pre-Raphaelite ideals of her time: pious, pure and white; long, wavy hair, flower crowns and sheer dresses. Using the sliding box camera he received as a gift at the age of 49, he became an expert in both the wet collodian process, in which a piece of glass is coated with collodian and exposed, and in albumin printing – coating paper with egg whites, and he specialized in preserving this vision. to give a sharper, brighter effect.
A large collection of Cameron’s vintage prints is displayed alongside works by the enigmatic American artist Francesca Woodman in the National Portrait Gallery’s Portraits to Imagine. Woodman, who had been working since the 1970s, shared a similar preference for a certain kind of beauty; sexier but still dignified; Perhaps both he and Cameron had inherited the world from their artistic, cultured families and privileged upbringings. Woodman’s self-portraits, painted while he was still a teenager (his first work featured here was taken when he was 13), show a body still operating on its own in space. She always reveals herself in the details; the same pair of black Mary Jane shoes is repeated in many photographs; Like Cameron, Woodman produced all of his works in less than 15 years. Neither received much respect while alive; but their legacies far outlived them, and both were extraordinarily influential.
Although Woodman worked a century after Cameron and on another continent, the parallels between the two are surprising. In the first place, they share visual quirks; In the exhibition, photographs of each of them using the umbrella as a prop are paired. They also shared a love of role-playing and power dynamics: In a theatrical portrait of Cameron, she recreates a scene from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s The King’s Idylls and casts a friend and her husband as Merlin and Vivien, now wizards. He submits to the villain of Camelot; A searing satire about men’s weakness and arrogance in the face of feminine youth and beauty.
This image is accompanied by a fun series of photos of Woodman taken with Charles Moccio, a life model at the Rhode Island School of Design, where Woodman was a student in the late ’70s. Woodman moves in and out of the frame, clothed and naked; Moccio laughs and assumes various submissive poses; until at last he appeared to be slumped in a corner, clutching a sheet of glass that was pressing against his fat flesh. Here the edges of their play suddenly darken. A caption Woodman scribbled in pencil: “Sometimes everything seems so dark. Charlie had a heart attack. I hope things get better for him.” It reads as a warning as well as a somber reflection.
Both Cameron and Woodman enjoy drama, especially the exaggeration of classical, mythological, and biblical representations of womanhood. A full section of the exhibition brings together works from the Woodman’s Angels series, photographed in Rome in 1977; The artist creates the effect by leaping into the air in front of a pair of billowing white sheets hung in the window of an industrial warehouse. A portrait of urban seraphim alongside Cameron’s sweet-cheeked cherubs – beatific portraits of sometimes grim Victorian children taken in the 1870s.
Cameron was proud of his technical victories; When he achieved a success or his favorite work, he announced it in the titles. Woodman’s impressive and more experimental works in the exhibition include a collection of Caryatid pieces; giant diazotype prints depicting herself and her female companions as carved female figures found in ancient Greek temples. Purplish and space-hugging, these colors create an ambience of great feminine energy that contrasts with Woodman’s usual tiny square gelatin prints.
Another thematic section considers the working conditions of both artists: Cameron moved from a portrait studio at the V&A to do most of his work in a cleared chicken coop at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. (If you’re wondering about the animals’ fate, Cameron wrote: “The chickens have been released, I hope they don’t get eaten.”) Woodman is known for the ominous, industrial interiors he created in many of his self-portraits. the peeling wood floors and large windows, it’s impossible to look at them now and not think of her suicide in 1981, aged 22. Both posed for photos outdoors to connect with nature. Two photographs taken by Woodman in Antella, Tuscany, in 1978 are exciting: the ruins of a building opening up in the sky; in another, his body is crushed under a tangled mass that appears to descend from above. They are reminiscent of Graciela Iturbide’s supernatural shots of Mexico from the same period. These are glimpses of the artist Woodman could become.
In this exhibition, it is also a salvation from the attack of beauty, which becomes persistent and obsessive after a while. The prints themselves are astonishing, but it becomes tiring as each artist pursues and re-articulates now-tired ideas of ideal feminine beauty. Neither artist was reflecting the world or his time; these portraits were personal sculptures, blurry facsimiles of the feminine beauty they saw and experienced.
The smoky, hazy picture of photographs of imaginary women begins to leave you in the dazed daydreams it promises. It then ends in a room explicitly called Men, which features some of Cameron’s most famous portraits and some of Woodman’s least known. This room is surprisingly welcoming; It gives us the chance to examine these male figures (the artists’ friends, lovers, and acquaintances) and expose them to the public gaze.
Here both seem to break away from portrait tropes and conventions; Cameron and Woodman create their own language for looking here. Portraits of men, on the contrary, show that we are all held back by the way we view women and what we look for in them.
As the title suggests, these are portraits we must imagine; To get lost and then maybe find ourselves in it. But when I left the gallery, the images quickly faded from my mind, like night ghosts. I woke up with a slight discomfort and a dazed feeling of being wronged.