Customer Reviews

Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden

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After reading Mavor's previous book, I sat transfixed for something like three days---her wonderful, insightful, and truly beautiful prose always leaves me breathless. This new book is just as good as the last. She leaves you with completely fresh ways of thinking about adolescence, beauty, motherhood, photography, the Victorians and ourselves. She is objective, yet highly intimate and personal at the same time and the result is the most complex and yet accessible academic writing I have ever encountered. Her work and particularly this book have informed my thinking about my own life and my work in ways that no other has before.

Carol Mavor takes interesting and provocative photographs from Queen Victoria's era, and turns them into an intellectual tour de force. She dissects Hawarden's motivations and her work comparing it to her modern peer, Sally Mann. As an ardent and avid photographer of interesting women I think that Carol Mavor looks beyond the two dimensions of a photograph to see the soul of the subject...Hawarden was clearly not a woman of her time and class, but an artist beyond time. I am fascinated how well smart women can see beyond the superficial to the suprising, how emotion and sensuality is exposed through Victorian garments, or Virginia countryside naturalism. This book made me want to meet Carol Mavor, and you, the reader will be facinated by what she has to say as much as the photos say for themselves.

Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, was a 19th century British noblewoman who took some interesting photographs of her daughters. Like most amateur photographers feeling their way along, her photographs could be startlingly bad, but more often she showed superior artistic ability. I purchased this book based on a remainder bookseller's brief catalog description of it as the true story of the life of an unknown 19th century photographer, whose work has been hidden from general view.

Well, I learned very little about Clementina's life, and little about the creation of her body of work --except when it suited Ms. Mavor to let a few real details slip; at least when the details could be made to coincide with her theories about Clementina and her working life. Ms. Mavor assigns all kinds of meanings behind and within Clementina's photographs, as well as to the work of several photographers and artists who have portrayed young women in the distant past and in the present. Another reader might choose to believe Ms. Mavor's assumptions and interpretations. But I couldn't buy the author's pretentious theories about photography, women's lives, the feelings of pre-teen and teenage girls, and what certain artists REALLY meant to "say" with their paintings or photographs.

Sally Mann (an exceptional modern-day photographer of young women and girls) was smart to make Ms. Mavor insert a disclaimer pointing out Ms. Mann's disagreement with the author's interpretations of her photographs.

If you want to read a book that will make you say "oh, PUH-LEEZ!" upon closing it, then this is the book for you.