Customer Reviews

Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll

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This book was meant to accompany the exhibit of the photography of Lewis Carroll that visited the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2002, Houston in 2003, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Each photo has an attached discussion. The introduction to the collection by Director Neal Benezna is short and sweet. The discussions of the history and esthetics of Victoria photography (hagiography, prelapsarian freedom, tableaux vivants, historical reconstructions, imaginary themes, etc.) by author Douglas R. Nickel is useful and accurate as it appeared entirely based on the authoritative biography of Carroll by Cohen and on the scholarly work of Karoline Leach in her book "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild." Like Lewis Carroll's photos, this book has the excellent quality of directness, and an aesthetic purity that springs from a delight in the beautiful. Unfortunately, no nudes appeared in the exhibit and only one made its way into the book (Evelyn Hatch, figure 17, page 66.) That's a pity as it reflects badly on the freedom of artistic expression that Lewis Carroll championed. Another negative: The colored-in photos are not represented. They were interesting for many reasons and in a way anticipated the advent of color photography. I have five of them in my collection. They are truly beautiful and were photographed by Carroll and may have been colored by Carroll himself or by Miss Thompson, his woman friend.

Nichols has done a fantastic job of collecting some of Carroll's (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's) most memorable images here in his book. Why the title? Perhaps because so many of Dodgson's images are of various states of somnolence... only Nichols can answer this question, or perhaps that Dodgson was a dreamer, for we know this for he was, after all, the force behind the Alice books, Sylvie and Bruno, The Hunting of the Snark (all under the name Lewis Carroll, whereas his photography was under the name Charles Dodgson, his real name.)

Nichols provides a thorough and interesting history here, although note this is not really a book for anyone who is not seriously interested in Dodgson's work as a photographer - if you really want to get to know Dodgson by all means, buy this book!!! Also buy Edward Wakeling's fine book at the same time, The Princeton Collection, which is self-explanatory and more of Dodgson's work, also with some exposition.

A beautiful book, a rare treasure, and a delight for the scholar as well as perhaps, the lay-reader willing to delve fathoms deeper into Dodgson's work.

Well worth the dive ~

sadi ranson-polizzotti

I was really hoping for a photography "coffee table" type book when I got this item, but the bulk of it is text, which albeit enlightening, was not at all what I expected. The images themselves are printed quite small, approximately the actual size of a daguerreotype, whereas the book is 10"x11", so I couldn't help but wonder why the pictures were not enlarged more. I also felt there were not enough images; I have no idea how large a body of work Lewis Carroll left for posterity, but it seemed lacking. Overall I was disappointed.

The whole of the 'biographical' section of this book seems to be taken from Karoline Leach's insane and scurrilous book 'In the Shadow of the Dreamchild', from which it borrows the whole crazy concept of the so called 'Carroll myth'.

But this is still a very fine book and the best analysis of Carroll's art that has been produced to date - a world better than the anxious misinformed and apologetic stance taken by the nervous Roger Taylor.