PHOTOGRAPHS
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge [Lewis Carroll]
England (1832 - 1898)
Lorina Liddell with Black Doll
1858
Albumen print
5 1/8 x 4 1/8 in. (13 x 10.5 cm) image and sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.51

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was a mathematics teacher at Christ Church, Oxford, and an early practitioner of portrait photography, especially of children. His favorite subjects were young girls, and he often photographed them in the nude (with their parents' permission). Adhering to Victorian neoclassical ideals about the virginal purity and beauty of young girls, Carroll photographed the girls for purely aesthetic purposes. There is no evidence that his intentions were sexually oriented, and he requested that at his death all of the photographs be destroyed or returned to the sitter. Because of this, none seem to have survived. This portrait is one of his "child friends," as he called them, Lorina Liddell, eldest daughter of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church and older sister to Carroll's favorite little friend, Alice Liddell, upon whom Carroll based his famous Alice in Wonderland books. -- Label copy for After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, December 4, 1994 to March 26, 1995.

Although he was an avid and accomplished photographer, Charles Dodgson is best known to contemporary audiences as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. For all its deliberate strangeness, this book has been recognized as a subtle attempt to characterize the adolescent female psyche. Each image memorializes a girl in the process of maturation on the brink of womanhood. They are all portraits of the daughters of Dodgson’s relatives and friends. -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.