Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood

Description

How Lewis Carroll's photographs of children gave visual form to evolving ideas about childhood in the Victorian era 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 transitio

Diane Waggoner is curator of nineteenth-century photographs at the National Gallery of Art. Her books include The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978 (Princeton), The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875, and East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

"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."---Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, V&A Magazine "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. . . . The book will appeal not just to Carroll aficionados but to anyone with an interest in the development of photography in the 19th century."---Jonathan Harwood, Black & White Photography Magazine "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."---Jonathan Harwood, Black & White Photography Magazine "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 making 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. "---Jennifer Green-Lewis, H-Net Reviews