Portraits to dream in

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron are two of the most influential women in the history of photography. Living a century apart – Cameron working in England and Sri Lanka from the 1860s, and Woodman in America and Italy from the 1970s – both women explored portraiture beyond its ability to record appearance. Positioning their work together in a way never seen before, the exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 21 March to 30 June 2024, spans the careers of both artists, showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints.

By virtue of the passage of time that separates them, Woodman and Cameron encountered very different ways of making and viewing photographs, from technical developments to critical understanding of the function of photography and the social and cultural expectations of women artists. Francesca Woodman came to photography at the start of her teenage years. She was gifted a camera (by her father) and called her first resolved work a ‘Self-portrait’, taken at age 13. Trained at art school, she worked intensely for nine years in the United States and Italy, between 1972 and her death in 1981. Woodman predominately used medium-format cameras that produced square film-based negatives. She handprinted her work, making mainly gelatin silver prints in the darkroom, and less frequently producing colour images.

Julia Margaret Cameron was also given a camera (by her daughter and son-in-law), in December 1863, aged 48. She recorded her ‘first success’ in photography, a portrait of a young girl called Annie Philpot, a month later. Largely self-taught, she worked prolifically for 15 years, primarily in the United Kingdom and then Sri Lanka, where she died in 1879. Cameron made albumen prints using the wet collodion process. Her apparatus was a wooden sliding box camera, which needed to be placed on a tripod to make an exposure during a portrait sitting. She made prints from glass plate negatives first sized approximately 10 x 12 inches, then from 1865 using a camera that held larger 12 x 15 inch glass plates.

When viewing prints by Woodman and Cameron in tandem there are many engaging pictorial comparisons, as well as pertinent points of departure. These include approaches to staging photographs, the use of props, the way the figure relates to space and architecture, and the use of expressive, emblematic gesture. Less obviously visible, but equally compelling, there is, entwined between them, a shared and indisputable force to pursue photography as a creative and expressive medium, to live and work as artists.

In the history of art, the work of many women artists has been limited or constrained by an overbearing biographical emphasis or reading. Portraits to Dream In challenges this approach in its insistence on experiencing the physical print – the picture making of Woodman and Cameron – as a starting point for consideration of their work. In ways that tantalisingly intersect and diverge, portraiture was fundamentally important to the work made by each.

Portraits to Dream In suggests both artists conjure a dream state within their work as part of their shared exploration of appearance, identity, the muse, gender and archetypes. The title of the exhibition comes from an observation made by Woodman that photography could be ‘a place for the viewer to dream in’. That her photographs do not ‘record reality [but] offer images an alterative to everyday life’. Both Woodman and Cameron produced work that was deeply rooted in mythology, legend and storytelling and both made portraits of those close to them to represent these narratives.

At the heart of the exhibition are questions about time. We view the work of Woodman and Cameron side by side but not in a chronological sequence, nor in a linear forward direction. We move forward and back in time between the 19th and 20th centuries, but also within the relatively short span of years that each artist was active. The exhibition asks us to reflect on how we might consider the work of two artists whose lives and practice move further away from the present day, yet not more conceptually distant from us as works of art, as time passes.

Remaining fluid and alert to possible similarities and points of departure that arise pictorially, structurally and metaphorically between the two reveals new ways of appreciating and thinking about these important artists, portraiture and the relationship between 19th- and 20th-century photographic practice.