There’s a risk in bringing together artists from different time periods. The older artist might look staid, the younger green or lightweight. Thankfully, in this pairing of Julia Margaret Cameron, born 1815, and Francesca Woodman, born 1958, neither is true.
But even if their individual greatness emerges undiminished, and it features hundreds of magnificent, unforgettable images, this is not a wholly successful show. Because while they’re pioneers in the same medium, they feel like they’re speaking a different language.
The curator, Magdalene Keaney, uses the analogy of the two artists as circles in a Venn diagram; but the overlapping eye where the two meet feels vanishingly slight.
Woodman never referred to Cameron directly, even if in her short life, before she died by suicide in 1980, she clearly absorbed photography’s history deeply.
Then there’s an obvious technological separation: Cameron at the birth of the medium, making albumen prints (photographs made using egg whites) with a tripod-mounted, wooden sliding box camera; Woodman using medium-format cameras and an array of other technologies developed over more than a century. She could shoot handheld, use a shutter release cable, and act with infinitely more flexibility. The passage of time feels marked.
The show is organised around themes linking the artists’ work: representations of angels and mythology, nature and femininity, depictions of men, and favoured models. But they tend to emphasise distinctions rather than commonalities.
Winged figures in Cameron, while captured with spellbinding lyricism, are squarely related to depictions of angels and putti in historic painting. While Woodman, too, reflected on angels in the art of the past, she employs them obliquely, in an experimental and performative space.
Woodman pictures herself jumping into hanging “wings” formed from sheets in her shabby, cavernous studio, or shoots herself naked from above, her naked breasts in sharp light against a wooden floor. As well as photography’s huge shifts, we see giant leaps in what constitutes art.
In the section on mythology, Cameron’s scenes closely evoking the preoccupation with Arthurian legend in Victorian painting, are awkwardly connected to Woodman’s White Socks and Easter Lilies, which seem much more preoccupied with Woodman exploring her body in space and in relation to objects.
The relationship here is more with Surrealism and the unconscious than any mythological subject. Indeed, Woodman cited the writings of Surrealism’s founder André Breton as her greatest influence.
The exhibition’s title reflects Woodman’s idea of photography as a place “for the viewer to dream in”, as an alternative to everyday reality, and it’s this psychic space that I think she wants us to occupy, rather than the mythic realms dwelt on by Cameron.
Still, there’s much to admire, including a section on both artists’ productive engagement with ancient art and the fullest display I have seen of Woodman’s under-explored representations of men.
Her body of work, cut so tragically short, never fails to astonish me in its breadth, imagination, clarity and beauty. Which makes this show, for all its conceptual shortcomings, unmissable.
