BY: Kevin Jackson

A personable young Victorian gentleman in frock-coat stands with his arm draped matily (perhaps even a touch amorously) around the shoulder of a skeleton. Allowing for the greater bulk of clothes, tissue and blood in the one on the left, they're almost the same size, and they're both facing to the right in much the same posture, so that you have the comic- creepy impression that the fellow is literally showing off his own bones, as if he were a cutaway diagram in an anatomy textbook. On the table in front of this odd couple are a brace of skulls and the complete skeleton of a smaller primate, some monkey or chimp, with huge goofy eye sockets. Curioser and curioser...

This photograph, Reginald Southey with Skeleton and Skulls, comes as an agreeable surprise in the context of A Collector's Choice, the new exhibition at Bradford's National Museum of Photography; it's about the only image in the show that seems to have been conceived in a spirit of fun, however idiosyncratic. The man who contrived this bizarre set- up was one CL Dodgson of Christ Church, Oxford, better known in literate nurseries as Lewis Carroll, and more usually associated with solemn studies of little girls.

But here, in 1857 (eight years before the publication of the first Alice book) is Carroll the photographic wag, making what now looks like a visual quip, two years before the publication of The Origin of Species, about men and apes being cousins beneath the skin. Perhaps that touch of controversialist's wit was accidental, and Carroll's conceit has grown more sardonic with the passage of time; in any case, the picture is about as jaunty as a memento mori can be.

Where Carroll was using his camera to demonstrate the material scaffolding of the human face, quite a few of his contemporaries were obviously in search of its spiritual underpinning - what an age of belief would have felt comfortable in calling the soul. A journalist writing for The Graphic in 1873 said of Julia Margaret Cameron's work that "Those who have seen some of Mrs Cameron's portraits, and have also seen the persons portrayed, cannot but think that there is a power in Photography to reveal some mysteries of the being, which flesh and blood cannot reveal."

Hats off to that uncredited writer. Nowadays, it's almost banal to point out that photography offered the world not simply a new technology of depiction but a fresh way of seeing. What the chap from The Graphic had cottoned on to so quickly was that the same camera which, proverbially, did not lie, could also and more importantly tell unprecedented kinds of truth, and that you could learn something new about a person from a mechanical record of the contact of light with flesh.

Walking around this beguiling set of core samples from the first 30 years of British portrait photography, it's easy to detect the earnestness with which those truths could be pursued. Michael G Wilson, a leading collector of 19th -century photographs, has culled his show from the NMPFT's archive of more than a million prints, and he's opted for a solid, classically- inclined anthology - generous representations of the big names, with a sprinkling of works by lesser-known figures and off-beat studies from the famous.

The show begins with cases of daguerreotypes and a sizeable chunk of work by William Henry Fox Talbot, the British inventor of the calotype (faster exposure time, hence a better medium for portraits of anyone who wasn't either asleep, dead or preternaturally lazy), and it concludes with almost 30 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, some extremely familiar and none the less welcome for that, others - including a sequence from her years in Sri Lanka - less so.

Between these chronological brackets are works by the standard reference- book pioneers: the Edinburgh team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, compared in their brief heyday to Rembrandt, but given to a stagey solemnity (harps, robes, heavenward gazes) that only the pure of heart will not find a bit silly; Roger Fenton's heavily edited coverage of the Crimean War; and Lewis Carroll, who was notably sniffy about "Mrs Cameron's large heads taken out of focus", preferring pieces by Lady Hawarden - a verdict that now seems as perverse as, say, Samuel Butler's promoting Handel to a rank well above Beethoven, or GB Shaw's assertion of the massive inferiority of Shakespeare to GB Shaw.

Clementina, Lady Hawarden is represented by a quartet of exposures showing young ladies next to a sun-flooded window, young ladies at the dressing table, a young lady reading a book and a young lady, Isabella Grace Maud (the photographer's daughter), posing stiffly in front of a full-length mirror. Feminists have struggled womanfully to see Lady H's work as expressive of "a sense of entrapment within Victorian expectations," but it would be rash to rule out the possibility that she just thought her girls looked pretty in their nice frocks.

Grittier matter is provided by the likes of John Thompson, with his studies of street life in London (1877) - one of which, entitled The Crawlers, showing an old woman scrunched up in a doorway, was treated to a full- page enlargement in last Saturday's Independent magazine, and was a lot easier to read there than the tiny original; and by Oscar G Rejlander's A Night on the Streets of London, which depicts a sleeping waif who, to cynical modern eyes, shows suspiciously clean -looking legs and shoulders through artful rents in his garments.

The exhibition achieves a memorable final act with its celebration of Julia Margaret Cameron, whose soft-focus work may have looked sloppy to Carroll but now seems like one of the least disputable glories of its age. Even for those less than entranced by her penchant for dressing- up, allegorising, theatricalising or what have you, some of the plainer portraits - including the well-known ones of her niece Julia Jackson, of "Iago", of Tennyson (two versions here) and of Carlyle - are triumphs of the youthful art.

We know from Cameron's writings that she was intent on catching the spiritual essence of her sitters, and these fruits of her perfected technique are powerful enough to make you feel a hint of the supernatural. If I could shop -lift just one image from A Collector's Choice it would probably be Cameron's portrait of Thomas Carlyle - a haunting encounter with a haunted mind, a two-dimensional Michaelangelo carved with sunlight, far more sombre than the Rev Dodgson's breezy brush with mortality and far more beautiful into the bargain.