An Unexpected Pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron

This spring, the National Portrait Gallery in London has staged an unexpected pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron, whose bodies of photographic work were made a hundred years apart. The lushly titled Portraits to Dream In, the result of a thoughtful and imaginative curatorial inquiry, provides a compelling guide to their posthumous resemblances and describes a cultural arc of Romanticism from the mid-nineteenth-century to the turn of the twentieth, from luminous and pastoral to haunted and opaque. Both artists were engaged with the past, and the exhibition places them in a shared classicism of figuration and myth—a revelatory insight for Woodman. Both practiced photography for less than fifteen years. Both of their biographies often eclipse their critical reception. At times their congruence feels magnetic; at times their differences are as illuminating as their similarities.

The exhibition is organized by curator Magda Keaney in tidy themes that support affinities between the two women, among them “Angels and Otherworldly Beings,” “Mythology,” “Doubling,” and “Nature and Femininity.” Much of this is informative and, indeed, suggests a universal lexicon beyond this survey of dual sensibilities. Some of the rhymes are less plausible: a section entitled “Men” fails to persuade that Cameron’s depictions of eminent male political and cultural figures mirror Woodman’s male portraits. Unclothed men make rare appearances in Woodman’s photographs, where they do little to diminish the images as self-portraits. Festooned with a seashell, egg, pomegranate, or dead bird, the men serve as playful surrogates for the photographer herself.

Portraits to Dream In is an occasion to revel in the sumptuous texture of the photographic print, born from technologies decades apart. For both photographers, darkroom manipulation and tactility contribute to the pictures’ emotional mood, however diametric. For Cameron, the shallow depth of field and long shutter speed of the glass plate negative and wet collodion process renders a picture that flutters as if provisional, a vision subject to light glinting off an immaterial surface. They are as ethereal and transparent as Woodman’s are submersed in shadow; a moth bounding away from flame. One body of work, despite its soft patina, feels rooted in a sense of presence, the other by absence: fraught and confessional without evident disclosure.

One of the pleasures of the exhibition is that it inspires thinking about the diversity of photographic narrative—here, one illustrative and the other suggestive. So too, the formal characteristics of the medium as an embodiment of the values of its era. As an act of photographic theatre, Cameron’s portraits are famously a pictorialist stagecraft: a pantomime of Christian archetypes, Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, and the influence of contemporary poets such as Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. What would be considered as potential subject matter for this nascent thirty-year-old medium was formative and cautious, and the conventions of beauty and gender, static.

In vivid contrast to this Victorian piety and virtue, Francesca Woodman’s theater is a modern dramaturgy of emotional monologue (and the staging of Samuel Beckett), of performance art and contemporary choreography and most crucially, an assertion of the female body into the social space, aligning with feminist thinking. The work was made at a time when the subjectivity of the medium and a photographic narrative for what was felt was emerging, and particularly embraced in art school, where self-expression and identity seemed obligatory. In the 1970s, a smart photography student would be absorbing the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Nancy Rexroth, and Deborah Turbeville. As a student, Woodman gathered this burgeoning photographic interiority to the self-absorption of youth.

It’s possible to perceive both aesthetic contexts as a continuing exemplar of photography seeking its status as a high art form, contrary to its mechanical reputation. A meaningful presence in Portraits to Dream In is one of the last works of Francesca Woodman, from 1980, which departs dramatically from her more familiar small and elusive pictures. The monumental schema of the Caryatid series, an eight-foot-high construction of diazotypes—a form of blueprint—of draped female figures, referring to the carved figurative pillars in ancient Greek art: Here is a self-portrait of empowerment, of architectural strength, suggesting the future of her work with the benevolence of time. These last Untitled works connect the correspondences between the two artists—who shared a legacy of romanticism, rooted in the mythic antique—and their enduring power through their lifetimes and into our present.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through June 15, 2024.