I Am Not Throwin’ Away My Shot: Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits To Dream In
@ National Portrait Gallery, London
A wonderful comparison exhibition of techniques, styles, inspiration. They were similar, but at the same time, very different. Both drafted in their friends and partners to form their images. Francesca Woodman was more conscious of playing a part, sometimes created with her partner and often with her own body, of creating stylised images. Cameron co-opeted her servants (and friends’ servants), and passing famous friends, and you wonder how much choice they had?!! But she also got her children and daughter-in-law in on the act! and the result is charming, visually appealing. Both artists created atmosphere laden works.
On the other hand, they both have a sense of playfulness, of emotion, deep feelings, of romanticised drama, of mythology and use striking black and white images to achieve this. Given that Cameron was purely amateur and self-taught, her images are astonishing. Woodman has more heft behind her having studied photography as an art form, beginning at 13, coming from a family of artists, and seeking a professional career out of her art making . Clearly she was inspired by Cameron — and they were both influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and Romanticism. Cameron proves that life begins at 40 (she didn’t start creating images until she was 48); Woodman is fresh out of art school and trying to carve her way in the artistic world.
Just as Cameron aimed for sensibility with her photographs of young women swooning into verdant flowers and cherubic children sweetly kissing, Woodman targets vulnerability — we get some very candid close-up shots of male nudes, or of men at rest. Only unlike Cameron sometimes Woodman gatecrashes her own images! as we often get her skittering into her portraits of others, and using her own body as a pattern, a form, a shape.
Both women photographers experimented with movement, with nature, with light and shadows, with spirituality, classicism and mythos in their works. Woodman moved more towards the Gothic, going full Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a woman emerging out of walls, behind wall coverings and furniture, or becoming a Victorian ‘ghost’, just a blur. Cameron achieved wonders in getting everyone, including small children, to stay very, very still, and the great and the good to get mussed up for art’s sake.
I didn’t know that Cameron and her family left the Isle of Wight, bustling Dimbola, for coffee plantations in Ceylon. Cameron’s husband was also completely supportive of his wife’s creativity, smashing the idea that all Victorian husbands were tyrants and oppressive.
There are also the dazzle moments in this exhibition. Cameron’s subjects are introduced to us, we learn more about her adopted child, her daughter-in-law, her servants and friends’ servants. Woodman evokes folk images such as the 1930’s American Gothic portrait by Grant Woods. Equally Gothic, suddenly Virginia Woolf’s mother pops up in a series of striking images! (and this what Cameron did so well, capturing real women and children in photographs as well as themes).
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@ Images are taken from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition and used purely to illustrate the author’s enjoyment of the exhibition. They do not belong to the author and are the property of the estates of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman/The Woodman Foundation. May 2024
