(Pomona, Cameron, via Met Museum)
I said I'd review it so...
Overall the segment on secrets of the museum from V and A was quite good. They decided to focus more on Alice Liddell than Lewis Carroll as the curator wanted a good photograph for a section of the Alice exhibit which will focus on Alice Liddell.
The V and A archive features a lot of Dodgson's photography as well as Julia Margaret Cameron, a contemporary of Dodgson who also photographed Alice Liddell. They even did the same types of studies (not mentioned in this sadly)
I would also have liked to have known if the V and A are using photography from Edward Wakeling's collection. Wakeling and other experts are sadly not mentioned.
Charles Dodgson is relegated to a brief overview. Its fairly decent. There is a section on Dodgson's photography, the curator picks out "the dream" as it has nice parallels with the Alice stories. I quite agree!
(The Dream, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, via SFMOMA)
I don't understand at all why the narrator says this though "Recently Carroll's relationship with Alice liddell has come under much scrutiny" It hasn't?? At least not in any scholarly circles!
Vanessa Tait is tasked with picking out a photograph of Alice Liddell for the exhibition. Tait tries to explain some of the differences the Victorian era had to the current time. I would have liked a Carroll expert (say Wakeling) to go over this as it is vital for understanding photography from that time.
Vanessa Tait places much emphasis on Liddell's role in creating the fictional Alice, saying she was "the one". In actuality many scholars agree that Liddell was only a namesake.
Tait chooses Julia Margaret Cameron's Pomona photograph, showing Alice Liddell as a young woman.
