An untitled image by Francesca Woodman from 1976 Photo: TB
Legend has it that Julia Margaret Cameron's last word as she lay on her deathbed on a tea plantation in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1879 was "beauty." Her version of beauty was somewhat classical and in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite ideals of her time: pious, pure and white - long, wavy hair, flower crowns and translucent dresses. She became an expert at maintaining this vision, using the sliding box camera she received as a gift at age 49 to master both the wet collodian process, in which a piece of glass is coated with collodian and exposed, and albumen printing - covering paper with egg white. for a sharper, shinier effect.
An extensive collection of Cameron's vintage prints is shown alongside pieces by the enigmatic American artist Francesca Woodman in the National Portrait Gallery's Portraits to Dream In. Woodman, who worked from the 1970s onwards, shared a similar predilection for a certain kind of beauty, sexier, but still understated - both she and Cameron perhaps inherited a way of seeing the world from their artistic, cultured families and privileged upbringings. In her self-portraits, taken when Woodman was still a teenager (her earliest work, included here, was made at the age of 13), she shows a body still working itself out, in space. Time reveals itself in the details - the same pair of black Mary Jane shoes appears in several photos; Woodman, like Cameron, produced her oeuvre in less than fifteen years. Neither was particularly respected when they were alive - but their legacies have long outlived them and both have been phenomenally influential.
Although Woodman worked a century after Cameron and on a different continent, the parallels between the two are astonishing. They primarily share visual quirks: the exhibition combines photographs of each using umbrellas as props. They also shared a love of role-playing and power dynamics: in a theatrical portrait of Cameron, she recreates a scene from her friend Lord Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, casting a friend and her husband as Merlin and Vivien at the moment when the wizard submits to the villain Camelot - a searing satire of male weakness and vanity in the face of female youth and beauty.
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Next to this image is a playful series of images of Woodman, taken with Charles Moccio, a life model at the Rhode Island School of Design where Woodman studied in the late 1970s. Woodman comes in and out of the frame, clothed and naked; Moccio laughs and assumes various submissive poses - until he finally appears slumped in a corner, a sheet of glass in his hand pressing against his toned flesh. Here the edges of their game suddenly darken. A caption scribbled in pencil by Woodman: "Sometimes things seem very dark. Charlie had a heart attack. I hope he gets better." It reads as both a warning and a somber reflection.
Both Cameron and Woodman are drawn to drama - especially the hyperbole of classical, mythological and biblical representations of womanhood. An entire section of the exhibition brings together works from the series Woodman's Angels, photographed in Rome in 1977, with the artist leaping into the air in front of a pair of billowing white sheets hung in the window of an industrial warehouse, to create the effect of a seraphic city dweller, next to Cameron's sweet cheeked cherubs - delightful portraits of sometimes combative Victorian children, made in the 1870s.
Cameron was proud of her technical triumphs - mentioning in her titles when she had a success or a favorite work. Among Woodman's impressive and more experimental works in the exhibition is a collection of her Caryatid pieces: enormous diazotype prints in which she depicts herself and girlfriends as sculpted female figures found in ancient Greek temples. Purplish and engulfing the space, they create an atmosphere of great feminine energy that contrasts with Woodman's usual small square gelatin prints.
Another thematic section explores the working conditions of both artists: Cameron moved from a portrait studio at the V&A to create most of her work in a cleared chicken coop in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. (If you're wondering about the fate of the animals, Cameron wrote, "The chickens were freed, I hope and believe not eaten.") Woodman is known for the ominous, industrial interiors she created for many of her self-portraits - stripped wooden floors and large windows, you can't look at it now and not think of her suicide in 1981, aged 22. Both also photographed outside, looking for a connection with nature. Two photographs of Woodman's, taken in Antella, Tuscany in 1978, are thrilling: the ruins of a building punch holes in the air; in another, her body is overwhelmed by a tangled mass that seems to come from above. They are reminiscent of Graciela Iturbide's supernatural recordings of Mexico from the same era. These are glimpses of the artist Woodman might have become.
It is also a relief from the onslaught of beauty, which in this exhibition becomes intrusive and obsessive over time. The prints themselves are stunning, but the pursuit and repetition of what now seem like tired ideas of ideal feminine beauty is becoming tiresome. Neither artist reflected the world or their times - these portraits are personal likenesses, vague facisimiles of feminine beauty as they saw and experienced it.
Smoky, hazy image after image of chimeric women, the show begins to leave you in the light-headed reverie it promises. Then it ends in a room bluntly called Men - some of Cameron's most celebrated portraits, and some of Woodman's least known. This room is surprisingly welcome, an opportunity to scrutinize these male figures - friends, lovers and acquaintances of the artists - and subject them to the public.
Here too they seem to break away from the tropes and traditions of portrait art; Cameron and Woodman determine their own language for viewing here. The portraits of men, on the other hand, suggest that we are all held back by the way we look at women and what we look for in them.
As the title suggests, these are portraits we should dream in; to get lost and then maybe end up again. But like nocturnal apparitions, the images quickly disappeared from my mind as I left the gallery. I was left with mild irritation as I woke up and had a fuzzy feeling that I was on the wrong foot.
