Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In by Isabelle Young
Self Portrait at 13, 1972 by Francesca Woodman. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS London.
Annie (My very first success in Photography), 1864 by Julia Margaret Cameron. © National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library - all rights reserved.
‘I feel that photographs can either document and record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: Places for the viewer to dream in.’ Francesca Woodman, 1980
Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981) took her first self-portrait aged 13, and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879) received her first camera aged 48. Between these acts they share a short but prolific period of intense creative output. Curated by Magdalene Keaney, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In at the National Portrait Gallery, London (until 16 June 2024) is an extraordinary recontextualisation of both artists’ work and the first exhibition to bring them together. By actively avoiding the more well-trodden narratives around Francesca’s work in particular, Keany steps away from both artists’ biographies to focus on the works themselves through illuminating pairings.
The exhibition opens with Julia Margaret Cameron’s Annie (My very first success in Photography), 1864 alongside Francesca Woodman’s Self-portrait at Thirteen, 1972 and their parallel lives begin. The works then centre around many of their shared subject matter; mythology, men, angels, transformation, high romanticism and staged portraits. In the 1860s, photography was still mainly perceived as a mechanical medium for commercial use and Julia was amongst a small number pushing forward its artistic possibilities. She worked at a time when it was uncommon for a woman to even be considered a photographic artist. However, she had the financial means to run her own photographic studio, and thus join and challenge the boys’ club. Julia was pushing against what she could do, going as far as possible perhaps because she knew her work would never be fully respected by the gatekeepers of art history within her lifetime. Likewise, Francesca consistently worked towards exposure in her lifetime. They knew they were good.
Akin to Francesca, Julia was unconcerned with pristine prints to instead experiment with new, messy ways of working with photographic chemistry and printing - the accidents and so-called imperfections are key to their work. Julia occasionally printed from broken glass negatives and shot deliberately out of focus, knowing full well that such works would be spurned by her male contemporaries. For works so heavily centred around fantasy and myth such ‘mistakes’ reveal the artist’s hand to ground them back in the real. Francesca likewise adored darkroom imperfections and marks on her prints, objects in which her hand is always present. Technical details were not permitted to interrupt ideas, instead subscribing to Roy DeCarava’s declaration that he “would rather sacrifice the information, in terms of details and things like that, for a feeling of mood.”
Walking around the exhibition it struck me how strange and exciting it must have been for Julia’s female friends to pose for her - sitters who had never seen their own likeness directly captured and printed through this new medium of photography. Working with the collodion wet plate process, Julia’s shutter speed ranged from around 3-7 minutes, meaning the camera’s shutter was open for this length of time to successfully capture an image, while the subject remained deadly still. They are decidedly not caught but held moments, created in and over time. Hold still.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980, Gelatin silver print, 1980. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS London.
Installation View, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In at the National Portrait Gallery, London until 16 June 2024 (Photo: Isabelle Young)
Francesca, her friends and models, on the other hand, were often on the move and fugitive subjects of her photographs. She consistently printed on a very intimate scale which makes both Francesca and her subjects even harder to see. I always smile when hearing laments that she didn’t print bigger - she doesn’t want to give herself away so easily, you have to look. Only one at a time. I cannot be shared. The caryatids, however, are monumental - installed in the centre of the exhibition in a space which architecturally envelopes the viewer within them. And yet, akin to the women these classical sculptures may well have been modelled on, Francesca’s model stands within the real world. She’s in 1980s New York - blurred atop a wooden chair. Mythology is continuously referenced across her work but fused with her own, contemporary identity. She is not restaging narrative akin to Julia but actively embodying it. The exhibition includes the remarkable contact sheet of photographs taken during her residency at MacDowell Colony in 1980 in which she wraps the bark of paper birch trees around her wrists, directly referencing the myth of Daphne who transforms into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s advances. I have never been able to separate the bark around her wrists from bandages, the tears from wounds.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, Gelatin silver print, about 1978-79
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS London.
Francesca’s artists books are also included - many for the first time. They were made from found publications sourced in flea markets and second-hand bookshops in Rome in which she inserted her own photographs over texts, poems, and geometrical diagrams. Rather than starting afresh upon blank pages, Francesca reasserts her own work’s context within the world that preceded her - to then pioneer a whole new vision of photography. In an Untitled, c. 1978-1979 Francesca is reflected lying in the sand in an oft-used oval mirror which a friend holds up below her own face on the shoreline of a beach. The softly breaking waves are mirrored in the torn textures of the photographic print’s edges. This is the first time this work has been shown and it is a revelation. It appears like a scene from the height of Italian neorealist cinema.
Julia Margaret Cameron, Iago - study from an Italian, 1867
© National Media Museum, Bradford / SSPL. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, Science Museum Group Collection
Francesca Woodman. Letter to Benjamin Moore on the back of a contact sheet collaged with transparencies, c. 1979-80. Ink, photographic transparencies, gelatin silver print, 118 x 252 mm. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation. © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London.
The exhibition closes on a room entitled “Men” - a subject of Francesca’s which is rarely exhibited or explored. In an extraordinary triptych, a topless Paolo Missigol first appears Mapplethorpe-like, then awkwardly holding a painting, and finally with a dead bird resting in his clavicle. The portraits of her boyfriend Benjamin Moore are remarkable, and the accompanying exhibition catalogue includes a contact sheet in which he appears in colour. Amongst Francesca’s conceptualised and expertly executed photographs there he stands in Piazza San Marco, Venice, feeding a pigeon. The casual, snapshot-like nature of this colour photograph is heart-breaking. Francesca’s highly performative work in which she often appears unmistakably nude are such daring and brilliant artworks, yet this felt like the most private photograph of them all.
Looking at Julia and Francesca’s male muses I was reminded of a passage from the American photographer Sally Mann’s memoir where she writes about photographing her husband Larry:
While working on these pictures, I joined the thinly populated group of women who have looked unflinchingly at men, and who frequently have been punished for doing so. Remember poor Psyche, exiled by the gods for daring to lift the lantern that illuminated her sleeping lover, Cupid.
I can think of numberless male artists, from Bonnard to Weston to Stieglitz, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.
Despite having seen numerous exhibitions of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman’s work before, upon leaving this exhibition it felt as though I had discovered two entirely new artists. Their works stand upon one another's shoulders to spur each other forward as radical, uncompromising, and brilliant artists. An overriding sense prevails that this exhibition is how both artists would have wanted their work to be shown.
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In
National Portrait Gallery, London until 16 June 2024
The Artist’s Books: Francesca Woodman
MACK Books