National Portrait Gallery

St Martin’s Place, London

Among the parallels between Francesca Woodman’s and Julia Margaret Cameron’s practices explored in Portraits to Dream In are their photographs of men. Woodman approached her male sitters—friends of hers—similarly to the way she approached other women and herself. The men in her pictures are staged, often with props, sometimes half-dressed and at other times wearing Woodman’s own clothing. Their gender seems indeterminate, and, particularly in her triptych portrait of painter Dale Chisman, they could be stand-ins for the artist herself. Cameron’s male sitters were also her friends, often eminent in their fields and in Victorian society, including astronomer Sir John Herschel and dramatist and poet Sir Henry Taylor. But Cameron’s portraits of her well-known contemporaries function as more than famous likenesses. Rather they become imaginatively and psychologically charged, particularly when shown with Woodman’s highly directed images of men who perform as part of her symbolic and opaque narratives. Additionally, these celebrated photographs by Cameron create a context for these lesser-known photographs by Woodman, which have often been overlooked by readings of her work that frame it as primarily self-portraiture.

‍

Click on the image above for a complete gallery view and details.