Nigel Ip

I’m a huge fan of Julia Margaret Cameron. Her soft-focus portraits – controversial in her own time – paved the way for photography to be treated as a work of art, not just a mimetic tool for capturing likenesses and documentation.

The National Portrait Gallery has chosen to pair her with Francesca Woodman, a photographer whose life and career has spurred a flurry of monographs in the past few years. Taking her own life at the age of 22, her self-referential images remain wildly elusive to this day.

While I enjoyed the exhibition on a surface level, it was immediately clear to me that the connections were simply cursory and tenuous. Although the paired groupings of their works on the basis of similar subject matter and loose themes offers an accessible introduction to both artists, it undermines Woodman’s individual creativity.

I see this exhibition as a way to insert Woodman into the canon of great female photographers, and by showing that she worked along the same ideas as an established great like Cameron, she could be viewed in a greater light, possibly even eliciting some more clues into how to interpret Woodman’s images. Conversely, we learn nothing new about Cameron’s work.

A solo dialogue with Cameron simply isn’t enough. The better move would have been to present Woodman’s works alongside works by a wider range of Victorian female photographers as well as Cameron, such as Lady Clementina Hawarden, Minna Keene, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Eveleen Myers, and perhaps even unknown photographers within the Pictorialist genre. This way, we can relate Woodman to a stronger line of discourse. One could even narrow it further to understanding ‘spirit photography’, something Woodman’s images are often compared with. The biggest flaw in all this, however, is giving Woodman the greater emphasis so as not to seem out of place in an exhibition grounded in historical context.

Even in America, there are similar candidates for such dialogues to be made. Imogen Cunningham’s soft-focus portraits could parallel Cameron’s photography to some degree, while Frances Benjamin Johnston also made self-portraits while working as a photo-journalist.

Nonetheless, this is a very pretty exhibition and shouldn’t be missed either way. The hang is elegant, sometimes impressive. The most informative sections tended to be at the end, where we are introduced to the real sitters that feature heavily in their works.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In runs from 21 March to 16 June 2024 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, https://www.npg.org.uk/