Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer - Hardcover

Cohen, Morton N.; Carroll, Lewis; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center; Flukinger, Roy; Haworth-Booth, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893817961 ISBN 13: 9780893817961

Publisher: Aperture, 1899

Synopsis

A groundbreaking book, the only volume of first-class reproductions of Lewis Carroll's photographs.

Published on the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Reflections in a Looking Glass presents Carroll's remarkable photography. Richly illustrated, this important book presents seldom-seen works-most of them formal portraits and staged scenes that combine Carroll's famous childlike sense of play with the Victorian propriety that characterized his age.

Also included in Reflections are selected drawings by Lewis Carroll and by John Tenniel, who illustrated the original Alice books. The central text by Morton N. Cohen, the world's leading authority on Lewis Carroll, provides an in-depth account of Carroll's experimentations in the new medium of photography. His hobby opened the door to many of his "child friends" as well as to leading artistic and literary figures of the day, all of whom came to Carroll's studio to sit for their portraits.

Excerpts from Carroll's diaries combine with Cohen's annotated captions to make this book an invaluable resource. The book also includes a Preface by Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Afterword is by Roy Flukinger, curator of photographs at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, the source collection for much of the material in this extraordinary book.

About this title

About the Author

Morton N. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, edited the two-volume The Letters of Lewis Carroll and has written or edited seven other books on Carroll, including Lewis Carroll: A Biography (Knopf, 1995).

Reviews

Published to accompany a traveling exhibition on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's death, this book is the most comprehensive ever produced on this subject, going far beyond Helmut Gernsheim's early work, Lewis Carrol, Photographer (1949), and several other books. Though Carroll was an amateur, he is widely considered the preeminent 19th-century photographer of children and would be considered so if he had not written a single children's book. This study documents his child-tableaux and also includes many portraits of the parents and other adults in his social circle. Alice Liddell and many other children of his colleagues and friends are represented here in exquisite reproductions that leave no question about Carroll's photographic talents. Several portraits were elaborately hand-colored or set into painted backgrounds by artists at Carroll's request. Highly recommended for history of photography, humanities, 19th-century concentrations, and children's literature collections.?Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Archives, San Francisco
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 1899
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0893817961
• ISBN 13: 9780893817961
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 143