Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: experimental photography

A black and white photo of a child with angel wings

Cameron’s 'I Wait' is paired with Woodman’s 'Untitled (Angels)' in the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition

(Image credit: Francesca Woodman / The J Paul Getty Museum / Los Angeles)

published 4 April 2024

"Just over 100 years separate the creative lives of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman," said Sean O'Hagan in The Observer. The former was English, "a Victorian pioneer of imaginative photographic portraiture"; the latter a 20th century American photographer who made "performative and mysteriously elusive self-portraits". Cameron (1815-1879) came late to photography, in her 50s; Woodman took her own life aged just 22 in 1981. As such, to present their work side by side, as this exhibition does, might seem strange. The show, however, seeks to demonstrate the ways both women used portraiture to create black-and-white images that transcended the simple idea of creating a likeness. Both, the curators argue, blurred the boundary between fact and fiction in their work; and they shared an interest in using photography to evoke spectral, dream-like atmospheres. The "dialogue" the show establishes highlights "creative connections" between the two artists across the eras, and while the parallels it makes are sometimes "tenuous", it is always "fascinating".

Cameron was "one of the most important contributors to the early days of photography", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Her portraits of eminent Victorians – Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle – still "adorn our school textbooks", and "her softly focused visions of angelic children" introduced a distinctly feminine quality to the medium. She worked with "a large fixed-plate camera that produced thrillingly detailed negatives". The work she described as her first "success" is a portrait of a friend's daughter; the child's face "fills the frame with juvenile sweetness" but there is also a hint of "tragedy" – something that became Cameron's calling card. This photo is displayed alongside Woodman's first work – a self-portrait created when she was 13, in which she hides her face "behind a shower curtain of hair". Where Cameron's work is "bold and close", Woodman's is blurry, introspective, nervy – and tiny. These two photos have almost nothing in common, and nor do the two artists.

Still, it's great to see a good selection of Woodman's work here, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. Her "distinctive visual language" of "velvety portraits set in romantically dilapidated interiors" evokes a particular strain of teenage alienation, in a compelling and formally inventive style: she captures herself as a "crouching hazy outline in a bare room", and in her "most famous picture", as "a young woman hanging from a doorway caught in a burst of light". Cameron, by contrast, is diminished by the show: rather than privileging her era-defining portraits of distinguished thinkers, it concentrates on her "insufferable" pictures of "too-sweet girls" and "pretty women", often shot in mythological costume. The show draws "one-dimensional" and "infantilising" parallels between the two. This serves neither well.