All in the Eye of the Beholder.
“The man who wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” was an equally brilliant photographer. But in modern times Lewis Carroll’s achievements have been overshadowed by the widely held conviction that his primary inspiration, literary and artistic, was an unsavory obsession with little girls.
Even as scholarly revisionists have begun questioning this presumed linchpin of the Carroll psychobiography, a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is challenging viewers to take a fresh look at his photographs. “Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll” argues that if we set aside modernist aesthetics and tabloid Freudianism and view these pictures in their Victorian context, they reveal themselves to be serious artistic works less concerned with the beauty of children than with theatrics, allegory and artifice.
In other words, Carroll’s pictures reflect not pedophilia but a kind of premodern postmodernism.”
Carroll’s Artistry and Our Obsessions
Unfortunately, the show won’t be coming to Los Angeles. And to think I was in San Francisco just this last weekend and missed this.