Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood - by Diane Waggoner (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"In 1856, when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll, photography was still a young medium, and presented uncharted possibilities for representation. Carroll soon found his forte in photographing children, and his photograph Alice Liddell as a Beggar Child (1858) is now one of the most famous Victorian depictions of a child. Carroll's engagement with childhood occurred at a critical juncture, when the idea of "childhood" was just beginning to attain status as a life stage with characteristics distinct from adulthood. In this sense, Carroll's photographs are especially rich, incisive, and complex: they embody conflicting definitions of childhood intertwined with constructions of gender, class, bodies, age, sexuality, and whiteness; behavioural norms and propriety; innocence and experience; fantasy, play, and imagination; and aesthetic standards and contexts of viewing. Author Diane Waggoner shows that Carroll's photographs of children were as important to him as his literature in modelling the concept and appeal of Victorian childhood. Based on over twenty years of scholarship and archival research, the manuscript places Carroll's images within broader Victorian visual and social culture. Waggoner shows how these contexts shaped Carroll's pursuit of a distinctive photographic vocabulary for childhood, and explores how Carroll established new aesthetic norms for images of girls; engaged with evolving definitions of masculinity, education, and boyhood; and pushed the definition of childhood to its outer limits with his use of fancy dress and nude images. Meditating upon Carroll's handling of childhood, time, and loss in both word and photograph, she argues that Carroll's photographs should be understood as powerful contributions to the nineteenth century's visual representation of the emergent definition of childhood"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>How Lewis Carroll's photographs of children gave visual form to evolving ideas about childhood in the Victorian era</b> <p/>Lewis Carroll began photographing children in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when the young medium of photography was opening up new possibilities for visual representation and the notion of childhood itself was in transition. In this lavishly illustrated book, Diane Waggoner offers the first comprehensive account of Carroll as a photographer of modern childhood, exploring how his photographs of children gave visual form to emerging conceptions of childhood in the Victorian age. <p/>Situating Carroll's photography within the broader context of Victorian visual and social culture, Waggoner shows how he drew on images of childhood in painting and other media, and engaged with the visual language of the Victorian theater, fancy dress, and Pre-Raphaelitism. She provides the first in-depth analysis of Carroll's photographing of boys, which she examines in the context of boys' education and reveals to be a significant part of his photographic career. Waggoner draws on a wealth of rare archival material, demonstrating how Carroll established new aesthetic norms for images of girls, engaged with evolving definitions of masculinity, and pushed the idea of childhood to the limit with his use of dress and nude images. <p/>This book sheds unique light on Carroll's decades-long passion for photography, showing how his complex and haunting images of children embody conflicting definitions of childhood and are no less powerful today in their ability to challenge, fascinate, and shock us.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>Diane Waggoner's comprehensive study, lavishly illustrated with excellent reproductions of Carroll's albumen prints, alongside letters and sketches, explores how his paintings and photographs helped shape emerging conceptions of childhood in the Victorian age.<b>---Jonathan Harwood, <i>Black & White Photography Magazine</i></b><br><br><p>Waggoner illuminates the complexity of her subject, bringing to it both fresh context and academic rigor. . . . This is a book to read carefully, as well as to look at, and it will be a vital addition to Carroll scholarship. . . . The result is a descriptive and measured account of the <i>making</i> of photographs whose subjects are familiar to any Carroll scholar, as well as a number that are less well known--which ultimately makes the book something of a corrective in terms of its content and approach. . . . Waggoner's book is strikingly beautiful but also . . . contributes so significantly to the history of childhood itself.</p><b>---Jennifer Green-Lewis, <i>H-Net Reviews</i></b><br><br>The best book yet written on Dodgson's photography. Measured in tone and thickly referenced, it is also refreshingly open to seeing both sides of an argument. In this sense it reads as much like a book written by Carroll as one about him.<b>---Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, <i>V&A Magazine</i></b><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Diane Waggoner</b> is curator of nineteenth-century photographs at the National Gallery of Art. Her books include <i>The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978</i> (Princeton), <i>The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875</i>, and <i>East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography</i>. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
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