A jewel-like show of photographs Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery, review

‘Hers are all taken purposely out of focus,” Lewis Carroll wrote of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, in a letter to his sister dated August 3 1864. “Some are very picturesque – some merely hideous – however, she talks of them as if they were triumphs in art”.

This letter, quoted in the catalogue to the exhibition Victorian Giants, offers a striking view of the 19th century photographer. On the basis of her famous images alone, one might imagine Cameron to have been a soft, romantic presence. But it makes far more sense that she should have been an overconfident matriarch. Photography, at its birth, was peculiarly welcoming to women – perhaps because it was considered to be an amateur’s medium, and inferior to painting. But a certain amount of initiative and self-esteem – not to mention cash – may have been required in order to undertake the practice at all. When Clementina, Lady Hawarden died of pneumonia at the age of 42, her mentor Oscar Rejlander described her as having been “fair, straightforward, nay manly” in her manner.

These four photographers – Rejlander, Cameron, Hawarden, Carroll – are the subjects of Victorian Giants. They were pioneers of a then-new medium whose “fates”, as the curator Philip Prodger puts it, “were intimately intertwined”. While they never formed anything as cohesive as a school or movement, and lived in different parts of the country, they taught each other, consulted each other, bought each other’s work, photographed some of the same subjects, and overlapped to such a degree that some images in this exhibition have only recently been correctly attributed. Yet the four have never been shown together before. The jewel-like exhibition is excellent – intelligently conceived, expertly displayed – and it reminds us that while men were at the forefront of photographic science, two women in particular had a lasting impact on its style.

The story the show means to tell is about art, influence, technology. Prodger’s erudite and evocative catalogue essays make clear that these practitioners were their era’s avant-garde. Some of the original glass negatives are on display, contributing to the treatment of these historical photographs as artefacts as well as images. You can see the imperfections in Lewis Carroll’s emulsion. Many of the Hawarden photographs are torn at the edges, as if ripped from time. And some of Cameron’s prints are so voluptuously immersive in their physical presence that they seem radical even now. Three in particular – a portrait from 1867 of Julia Duckworth looking down; one of Virginia Dalrymple (1868-70); and a blurred May Prinsep as the Head of St John (March 1866) – have blacks so rich that, in combination with their indistinct subjects, they have an effect close to science fiction – you expect the darkness to suck you in.

Of course, the main argument at the time was whether photography could be considered “art”. Many images here have classical or literary or biblical subjects. Rejlander, the only professional photographer among the four, acknowledged that photography could be the “servant” of painting – in other words, could be used as a source – but he also wanted it to be seen as “high-born… nursed by a most respectable Mrs Chemistry and fed on the most precious diet (of gold and silver)”.

Within this overarching story are more interesting ones. The ubiquitous photographs of children – particularly preferred by the gallery’s Patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, who has written the foreword to the catalogue and selected certain images for a Patron’s Trail – pose a question about purity, and perhaps also a question about latency. Children were in the process of becoming (many of them here, photographed over time, age before our eyes) and so was photography. But the Victorian idea of them as innocent seems especially misguided on the basis of Carroll’s grumpy Edith Liddell (1858), or his fuming Irene MacDonald (1863), who brandishes a weapon-like hairbrush with bristles in sharper focus than any of her own features. Over 150 years later, the children have got their own back, asserting for a modern audience their rage at being caught in the camera.

In that vein, the greatest discovery in the exhibition is a thrillingly strange image by Hawarden, to my mind always the most intriguing photographer of the four. Hawarden was a Scottish countess who had ten children. She photographed all of her daughters repeatedly, and there were so many of them it’s hard to keep track. Her photographs, which are often classical in their formal qualities, nevertheless anticipate the diaristic work of the 20th century photographers Sally Mann and Nan Goldin. They often contain more than one girl, and often feature mirrors, so that everything is about multiplication or reflection – an effect that might also be seen as a form of self-portraiture in the mother of so many. 

But this show contains one I had never seen, a small stereoscopic image of two young girls by a desk (Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude, 1859-61). They are wearing wide, stiff skirts and their feet are posed in a balletic first position, so they resemble paper dolls. Their hands are held Arnolfini Wedding-like. Something is awry in their expressions: one seems worried, the other aloof, and while this is technically impossible – since a stereoscope records a difference in space, not time – the two separate images appear to register different thoughts passing across their eyes. The image is instantly reminiscent of Diane Arbus’s famous twins. It is a weird, tiny masterpiece.

Victorian Giants is at the National Portrait Gallery Mar 1 - May 20 npg.org.uk