One of our mimsy minions has alerted us that a recent issue of Art History journal includes an article entitled “Shopping in St Petersburg: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs and Icons” Here’s a brief excerpt, courtesy of our minion:
“While critics have paid scant attention to Carroll’s Russian visit, maintaining it had little impact upon him since he never again travelled abroad, the rich visual experience of religious icon and secular photographic ‘type’ meant that after 1867, in revisiting Chinese and other costume photographs, Carroll contrived scenarios both formally and conceptually different from that realized in Lorina and Alice Liddell of 1860. Most noticeably he combined the distinctive material forms and metaphysical resonances of ‘photograph’ and ‘icon’ in his increasing preference for photographing individual female children dressed in ethnic costume posed in interiors devoid of the decorative trappings of nineteenth-century portrait studios.”
Issues of the journal are hosted by the Wiley Online Library. If you do not have access to the site through the institution for which you work, they also offer an option of renting access to the article for 24 hours.
The article appears in Volume 36, Issue 5, pages 968–993, November 2013.
