Charles Mann

The delicious Harlequin

Abstract The prim little girl in the century-old cabinet photograph 1 is wearing her very best dress, and the bow fitted around her waist must have made it difficult to maintain a balance in a high wind. But she most certainly could have coped with the problem because rope-skipping was her particular talent, and she practised it as ‘the skipping girl’ on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre2. Good looks and a few lengths of hemp made 11-year-old Constance MacDonald Gilchrist a London celebrity, and a personage who needed no introduction as late as 1898. She fascinated painters. Whistler was captivated enough to make two studies of her, retaining one of them, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl, Connie Gilchrist, until his death3. (It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Lewis Carroll svho, strangely enough, shared Whistlers interest in the theatre, also had a more than casual interest in little girls, and a near-professional interest in photographing them. That this great man has...

Studio sample sheet

Abstract This enormous studio sample sheet, featuring nearly 850 famous faces, and figures, spread across seven feet of thin canvas, was perhaps displayed in the window or behind the counter of a photographic establishment, or carried to small towns in England and abroad by a travelling studio salesman, in the hope of satisfying a popular demand for pictures of the Royal Family, political figures, stage and music hall performers, and celebrities of the day1 (Figure 1). Each tiny photograph carries a number; there are about 32 of these reduced images on each 4 ½ × 5 ½ in. albumen print, and 27 such prints pasted along the length of the canvas. They appear to have been reproduced by photographing a composite layout of printed portraits, as the images lack the sharpness of prints made directly from the negative. The first in a series of portraits of a particular person is labelled, and successive numbered poses of that person follow, until the next series begins. Thus, Lilly Langtry is featured in 25 poses, ...

Eudora Welty, photographer

Abstract That Eudora Welty1 in addition to her great gifts as a short-story writer should also have been a gifted photographer may come as something of a surprise. One thinks immediately of Wright Morris2, another original writer and photographer, whose interest in the art has continued to this day, whereas photographic activity was only a passing phase for Welty. For a time Eudora Welty thought of becoming a professional photographer, but her early portfolios did not sell, while her short stories did. In 1944 Vogue magazine published three of her pictures with an accompanying text, entitled ‘Literature and the lens’, the first of three statements that she has made on the nature of the photograph and of the moment it preserves3. Her photographs are indeed of One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression; A Snapshot Album to quote the title of a collection of her photographs published with a preface in 19714. A new and sumptuous portfolio of 20 well-printed photographs has since appeared5.

The Poet's Pose

Abstract In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennysons house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’1. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph tha...