Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman: portraits to build realities

Valencia,

Nearly a century separates the careers of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, the former a pioneer of Victorian portrait photography and the latter a short-lived American artist, author of performative self-portraits whose enigmas are still debated. Although neither of them received the recognition they deserved during their lifetime, the passing of the decades has indeed made them two of the most popular international photographers among the general public and now an exhibition that faces the challenge of exploring what united them despite their obvious differences can be visited at the IVAM in Valencia, after being presented until last June at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who benefited from the fortune and contacts provided by a privileged social environment, came late to the field, when her family gave her a camera in 1863, at almost fifty years of age; therefore, she developed her legacy in her last fifteen years of life, and was fundamentally self-taught. As for Woodman (1958-1981), she was part of a family of artists, with a father who was a painter and photographer and a mother who was a ceramist, and her fascination with the image was precocious: she was thirteen years old, and was educated at a private boarding school, when she made her first manually developed self-portrait. Given her suicide at twenty-two, in this case her career lasted only nine years.

Their working methods were necessarily closely linked to the technical devices that each of them had at their disposal: Cameron used a complicated camera that she placed on a tripod, and painstakingly created prints from glass plate negatives; Woodman, however, was able to use relatively light medium format cameras, although she chose to print her small silver gelatin prints by hand in a darkroom. Despite this disparity in procedures, we can say that both shared, even in this respect, some concerns and choices, such as their adoption of certain post-production processes as ways to unleash their imagination or their lack of concern for generating technically perfect scenes.

Delving deeper into her themes, it is known that Julia Margaret captured her close models as angelic beings inspired by Christian iconography and classical mythology; the angelic is also present in Woodman’s creations, but in a more elusive, earthly way and, in any case, nourished by her own psychology. Precisely the title of this exhibition, “Portraits to dream of”, alludes to the desire of both to investigate this genre of portraiture, usually marked by its limitations derived from commissions, from the imagination: it served them to address ideas related to the creation of images, appearances, identity, self-representation, the notion of muse, archetypes or storytelling.

Although these concerns may seem clearly contemporary to us today – and are clearly more rooted in American than British literature – they are also underlying issues in Cameron’s allegorical compositions, based on literature, myth or religion, although in a less provocative or open way.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: portraits to dream about. IVAM, Valencia

The IVAM exhibition, open until October and curated by Magdalene Keaney, begins with the first portraits that these authors declared themselves satisfied with: Cameron’s corresponds to a close-up of a young woman in profile, created in 1864 and titled, precisely, Annie, my first success; it seems quite different to us, and it is curious, from the numerous portraits of young and ethereal women that he would later create, because the sidelong glance of the girl and her calm expression suggest, above all, naturalness. Compared to it, Woodman’s composition, that self-portrait at thirteen, seems almost postmodern: an indistinct study in grey in which her face is hidden by her long hair and the work process is highlighted, literally and metaphorically, through the shutter release cable that extends from her hand to the lower right foreground, in an expanded blur. We are talking, in both examples, about declarations of intentions for the future.

The creative dialogue that the tour proposes, dealing with more or less concrete or outlined themes (the creation of images, nature and femininity, models and muses, duplication, angels, dream spaces), comes to underline both the connections between the two, sometimes tenuous, as well as their distances. It is necessary to emphasize this angelic chapter: compared to the religious or mythological roots of Cameron’s works (angels in mourning, almost pre-Raphaelite Venus), Woodman’s self-projections in this sense will seem carnal and untamed; her dynamic body almost suggests savagery by contrast. In the work entitled precisely On Being an Angelher arched body is framed from a high vantage point, her mouth open and her bare torso bathed in white light, but the sense of carnal ecstasy is partly diminished by the mundane sobriety of the surroundings: the camera equipment on the bare floorboards in the background, and the dark silhouette of an umbrella leaning against a wall. A surrealist touch can be detected here: although very present physically, her figure continues to elude the viewer. In her case, the self-portrait seems a form of self-concealment.

This kind of double anthology – which also includes surprises such as Iago (Study of an Italian) Cameron’s, an exception to his visions of an idealized femininity, or a large-scale triptych that Woodman made shortly before she died, turned caryatid – proposes, in short, a review of the imaginative strategies of both outside their much-analyzed lives, placing the British woman as a guiding presence in the complex mysteries of the American woman.