'Sun Drawings' and Sweet Artifice

 

By the mid-nineteenth century, the marvellous invention of photography was transforming image making. Modern photography can be traced to the 1820s and the development of the darkroom chemical process. The first glass negative was produced in late 1839 by Englishman, John Herschel. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates.

How miraculous to gaze at a photographic image held in one’s hand, for this was ‘real’; a slice of actual life caught forever, unmediated by the painter’s brush mark. It was as close to reality as one could get and if the early sitters for this wonderment were compelled to remain stock still for up to two minutes in order not to cause a blurred image, it must have seemed a small price to pay. From the beginning, early photographers exploited the medium’s truth-to-life. It became the perfect vehicle for creating fictional narratives, which convinced by simply being more ‘real’ than the most exact painting could ever be.

 In England, an eager convert to the new medium was the shy Oxford don Lewis Carroll. His photographic catalogue includes portraits of such Victorian luminaries as the actress Ellen Terry, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, John Everett Millais, William Holman-Hunt, saturnine, opium-addicted Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the art critic John Ruskin – who called his own early experiments with photography ‘sundrawings’.

Carroll also took many photographs of the young Alice Liddell the inspiration for two of the most widely read children’s books ever written; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass. 

In the photograph above, from around 1860, Carroll posed the little girl as a beggar, complete with a surprisingly coquettish, off-the-shoulder urchin dress and bare feet. The poet, Tennyson, claimed it was the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen.

The picture is a middle-class Victorian fantasy of destitution – a safe, more palatable version of unacceptable, stinking reality. Here, the clean, healthy, well-fed Alice stands against a wall in the corner of a tidy courtyard, perhaps in the grounds of Oxford University, where her father was Dean of Christ Church. In her play acting, she stares knowingly at the viewer/Carroll, with perhaps a hint of boredom at her task. One can imagine that, after the camera has been put away and the ‘slumming’ game has finished, she will skip off to her lessons or to Sunday school. In any event, she is a world away from the actual filth and appalling squalour of London’s Whitechapel or Bermondsey, for instance. Poverty, in this photograph at least, has been cleaned up and romanticised to the point where it has become acceptable – delightful even. This image ties into the Victorian notion of the fallen woman – as depicted in William Holman Hunt’s 1853 painting The Awakening Conscience. 

 

 This excruciatingly detailed picture contains an exhaustive catalogue of visual clues as to the unfortunate woman’s perilous moral state – each documented with hallucinatory, feverish clarity; the injured bird under the table, tortured by a cat; the half-naked woman under the bell jar on the piano; the sorrowful woman on the wallpaper, who crouches beneath bunches of succulent grapes; the single dropped glove on the floor at the woman's feet; the unravelling wool from some embroidery, etc. The viewer has come upon the scene at the very moment the woman rises to her feet, in apparent trance-like epiphany, as she sees the error of her ways. Hunt had previously embarked on a discovery tour of the areas of London where one might expect to find 'fallen women'. He found his model in Annie Miller, a prostitute from the slum of Cross Keys, Chelsea. Hunt fell in love with her, and, in best Pygmalion fashion, contemplated marriage, providing he could ‘improve’ her character. Alas, this proved beyond him. However, despite Hunt’s striving for ‘photographic’ exactitude, and despite the accretion of visual clues, it is still just a painting and is less believable - less real­ - for being so.

 

 The above photograph of a ‘street arab’ - as the destitute children of London were known - comes from the archives of Dr Barnardo’s Boys’ Homes. Dr Thomas John Barnardo was born in Dublin in 1845. He established homes for destitute children in London and throughout the United Kingdom. These homes were instrumental in saving nearly 60,000 children. The photograph is entitled ‘Lost’ and it appeared in a propaganda pamphlet from 1871. The dirty feet and hair appear real, as does the truculent expression on the boy’s face, but the pose is manufactured after the fact; the artfully torn clothes come from the props basket. The boy was indeed once an unfortunate street dweller, but by the time of the photograph he was safe in the arms of Barnardo’s institution.[3] Had the image been painted by John Millais, for instance, as a working-class version of his Cherry Ripe or Bubbles - it would have been a cosy rendition of a species of life that existed a short step, but a universe away from genteel drawing rooms. As a ‘real’ image, however, it had the power to make well-heeled philanthropists reach into their wallets. Barnardo even went as far as to produce 'before and after' images of rescued children, a fact that angered the Rev. George Reynolds, who wrote in 1876: ‘He is not satisfied with taking them as they are, but he tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they are. They are also taken in purely fictitious positions. A lad named Fletcher is taken with a shoeblack’s box upon his back, although he was never a shoeblack…’ – Quoted in The Camera and Dr. Barnardo, p.12.