by Nan
Mercifully, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a Lewis Carroll, is being recognized for his writing and his photography, minus speculation about his so-assumed peculiarity.

I watched a TV documentary about him and read some articles, which were very welcome in that they praised the artiste with no hint of enquiring about his pedophilic bent, which the authors I read thrust aside as nonsense. Good thing too since we do tend to read too much into people and events, and gloat when a peculiarity is unearthed, even though it may be the transference of a modern supposition to a person or event of long ago.

Defenders of Dodgson

The British photographic historian Roger Taylor finds our era’s obsession with Dodgson’s presumed deviance profoundly unfair. ‘’I’m very saddened that this is now the issue, rather than the quality of his writing and his photography and his mathematics. If he knew how he’s become a stalking horse for all our fears, he would recoil in horror."

The British author Karoline Leach states very emphatically that Dodgson, far from being a girl-loving, woman-hating recluse was a popular man about town whose intimate friendships with a great many women caused considerable scandal. She points out that Dodgson was making his pictures at a time when cheesecake photographs of little girls were a wildly popular art form. To his contemporaries these were depictions of innocence and goodness with no sexual connotation. ‘’In that era," Leach says, ‘’Adoration of little girls was trendy, it was cool, it was fashionable. If we don’t see that, we’re only seeing our own prejudices." She also notes that her findings were greeted with hostility by die-hard Lewis Carroll fans. ‘’I thought they would be pleased to hear that he wasn’t necessarily a pedophile. But some people, for whatever reason, seem to need to believe that Carroll was strange."

Karoline Leach authored the 1999 book on Carroll — "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild."

Judging by both his books and his photographs, people rushed to presume that Dodgson had an unhealthy fixation on girls; that he was a pedophile. This was what caught people’s fancy, overshadowing the marvellous story telling, the imagination and humour and the accuracy of his camera. He wrote about Alice for his friend’s daughter and photographed her in nightdresses and off-the-shoulder costumes, prettied and posed, often to symbolize concepts such as innocence. It was artistry and being of the times, not giving way to an unhealthy interest in young girls. As an article I read put it: ‘’Carroll’s pictures reflect not pedophilia but a kind of premodern postmodernism."

Charles L Dodgson bought his first camera in 1856, the same year he began publishing poetry and stories under the pen name Lewis Carroll. He was 24 and a newly appointed lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. Over the next quarter century he mastered the messy and cumbersome technology and produced thousands of images.

So now 76 of Dodgson’s pictures are on show in San Francisco and will travel next year to other parts of the USA. Says the curator of photographs at the San Francisco museum and organizer of the exhibition: ‘’There’s been very little about Dodgson the photographer that isn’t clouded by his literary reputation. If this show can just get people to look past their preconceptions and actually see the pictures, I’ll think it has done its job."

Another putting-matters-straight undertaking has been the publication of Dodgson’s photographs by Princeton University Press titled ‘’Lewis Carroll, Photographer" which presents for the first time all 407 of the photos in the university’s collection. It is hoped that people will view the photographs with unclouded eyes and clear minds, not blotched over by modern day fears of pedophilia etc.

Another Famous Photographer

Yousuf Karsh, famous photographer of the famous, died on July 13th, aged 93.

I suppose oldies like me remember the name and some of the photographs; avid readers that we were of the large-sized magazine Life.

I remember the myth we wove around a photograph of a young niece of mine taken by a photographer when he saw her seated with her husband somewhere in Canada. She had (has) this thick head of hair which fascinated the photographer even more than her dusky skin and sharp features. The photograph turned out to be a portrait and we signed it off as one of Karsh of Ottawa!

Yousuf Karsh was a Canadian by adoption. He was actually Armenian and thought of himself thus. His family migrated to Canada to avoid the misfortune that befell Armenia when divided between Turkey and Russia. An uncle in Canada who was doing well as a portrait photographer, took young Yousuf under his wing.

So Karsh turned himself into a photographer and during his leisure hours joined a drama group, mainly to study lighting techniques.

His breakthrough into the limelight came with his photograph of Churchill, in December 1941. The British prime minister was on a visit to Ottawa. Mr Karsh got the go-ahead to photograph the famous war premier. Churchill was not pleased. He gave the photographer just two minutes and no more and sat down with his lighted cigar between his lips. Karsh had the temerity to remove it and releasing the shutter on his camera the same time capturing the angry great man’s slightly petulant bulldog expression. Life magazine bought the picture for $100 and Karsh was set on his great journey of becoming the most famous photographer, signing himself as Karsh of Ottawa. The picture became the most reproduced portrait in the history of photography.

Over the years practically everyone who was anyone had portraits of themselves done by Karsh. Thus the saying that if you were Karshed you had arrived. And it was no easy job for the photographer. A portrait meant studying the person through reading biographies of him and having conversations with his friends. But he did, as an obituary says, possess the magic of capturing the essential element of his subject on the photograph which made them great portraits. He said he made no enquiries about this magic but it certainly was there.