Dodgson

Dodgson

You know those logic problems where you are given a series of factual but not obviously connected statements, like ‘John uses a Sony camera, and mostly photographs people’? You have to use logic to work out that Emma uses a Leica and shoots still life pictures, and drawing a series of grids of (in this case) people, cameras, genres and what-have-you helps you, if you have the right sort of mind.

Very early in life, I learned that the author, Lewis Carroll, had devised a rather complex problem of this sort with thirteen variables: the conclusion was, I understand, that none of the judges take snuff.

How’s this linked to the letter D, you may be wondering – along with that name at the top. The reason is that Lewis Carroll was the pen-name for a logician and mathematician called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Clearly he was a man of many parts – and the part of him that interests me today is his photography. At one point, apparently, he may have considered becoming a professional photographer: certainly, he was highly competent, and took portraits of a number of well-known contemporaries, including Julia Margaret Cameron.

Much of his surviving work consists of images of young girls, and this has been woven into a tale of paedophilia by the scandal-seeking. However, children, including nude children, are a recurring motif in Victorian photography. We will never know for certain, and it’s a principle of English law that a man is innocent until proven guilty, so let’s be kind. We live in a society that usually thinks the worst of people, which leads us to extraordinarily weird places.

Dodgson suffered from a stammer all his life (leading to speculation that his tendency to introduce himself as ‘Do-Do-Dodgson’ was the origin of the Dodo character in Alice in Wonderland: certainly the characters in the Caucus Race were related to his social group. Alice was Alice Liddell, the Lory her sister Lorina and the Eaglet Edith Liddell, while the Duck was the Reverend Robinson Duckworth). This doesn’t seem to have carried over into his photography with experiments in intentional camera movement or multiple exposures.

If you look Dodgson up on the internet, you’ll find a great deal of information, and many pictures by and of him. His interests were remarkably varied: we have very few public figures these days who excel in more than one field – and view the odd exceptions as quite strange!

Born in 1832 and dying in 1898, Dodgson was thoroughly Victorian in appearance and breadth of interests. I sometimes wonder if it was easier to achieve great things when every discipline was less developed than it is now: I suspect, though, that the Victorians simply possessed more energy and (perhaps) confidence than I have!

Go and look him up: there are an awful lot of different ideas and pictures that may inspire you, both in photography and logic! Just avoid taking snuff, like the judges. And don't write off the Victorians because they didn't have digital cameras and wide-aperture lenses. They made amazing pictures much of the time!