Lewis Carroll Photographer Of Children

Spanning some twenty-five years of work, an intriguing study of the photography of Charles Lutwidge Dogson ("Lewis Carroll") presents a rich array of more than 450 images that capture diverse facets of Victorian society, his relationship with the children he photographed, portraits of famous personalities of the time, narrative tableaux, and bizarre studies of anatomical skeletons. (Fine Arts)

Though he’s known now primarily as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in his lifetime Lewis Carroll was interested at least as much in photography as in writing. This book offers a close look at Carroll’s engagement with the medium, both as a creator and a collector of photographs. Lindsay Smith takes readers to the glass studio above Carroll’s college rooms at Oxford, where he created many of his striking portraits, and she also follows him into the field—on excursions to the theater in London, to the seaside at Eastbourne, and even to Russia. Smith also details Carroll’s enthusiastic work as a collector, in which role he arranged portrait sittings for photographers whose work he admired. Beautifully illustrated with a generous selection of Carroll’s work and that of other photographers of the period, this book gives fans of Carroll’s writing a new way to understand his creative genius.

Pictures and conversations : photographic meaning -- Liddell girls : Alice and her sisters -- Pretty boys and little men : becoming a boy -- Theatrical transformations : fancy dress -- In fairyland : partial dress and the nude.

A catalog of an exhibition held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

Renowned for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also one of the most important amateur photographers of the Victorian era and the period's finest photographer of children. From 1856 to 1880, Carroll took around three thousand pictures, the majority of which were portraits of family, friends, and colleagues. He also sought out and photographed celebrities of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Holman Hunt, Henry Taylor, George MacDonald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Ellen Terry, John Everett Millais, Charlotte Yonge, and Prince Leopold. Carroll's remaining output includes images of landscapes and architecture, works of art, and skeletons; assisted self-portraits; and other miscellaneous pictures. Today, his photographs are highly prized and fetch enormous prices at auction. This catalogue raisonné presents images of the nearly one thousand surviving photographs of Lewis Carroll—including many from private collections that have never been published—and provides information on their subjects/sitters, their locations, and the dates when they were taken, as well as extracts from Carroll's private diaries that mention his relevant photographic activity and background information concerning known prints. Edward Wakeling, an internationally recognized Carrollian scholar, has also reconstructed Carroll's lost register of his complete photographic opus. In addition to the catalogue, Wakeling discusses Carroll's activity as a photographer, his contacts with other Victorian art photographers, and his nude studies, and he provides a full listing of the contents of Carroll's various photographic albums. This is the most comprehensive study of Carroll's photography ever produced, and it will be a standard work for anyone studying Victorian photography and for Lewis Carroll's photographs in particular.

Bestselling author, pioneering photographer, mathematical don and writer of nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll remains a source of continuing fascination. Though many have sought to understand this complex man he remains for many an enigma. Now leading international authority, Edward Wakeling, offers his unique appraisal of the man born Charles Dodgson but whom the world knows best as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This new biography of Carroll presents a fresh appraisal based upon his social circle. Contrary to the claims of many previous authors, Carroll's circle was not child centred: his correspondence was enormous, numbering almost 100,000 items at the time of his death, and included royalty and many of the leading artists, illustrators, publishers, academics, musicians and composers of the Victorian era. Edward Wakeling draws upon his personal database of nearly 6,000 letters, mostly never before published, to fill the gaps left by earlier biographies and resolve some of the key myths that surround Lewis Carroll, such as his friendships with children and his drug-taking. Meticulously researched and based upon a lifetime's study of the man and his work, this important new work will be essential reading for scholars and admirers of one of the key authors of the Victorian age.

Contains 24 black and white photographs reproduced in postcard format.