Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood

How Lewis Carroll's photographs of children gave visual form to evolving ideas about childhood in the Victorian era.

Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood, by Diane Waggoner, delves into how Lewis Carroll began photographing children in the mid-nineteenth century—an era when the burgeoning medium of photography was introducing new possibilities for visual representation, and the concept of childhood itself was in transition. This lavishly illustrated book provides the first comprehensive account of Carroll as a photographer of modern childhood, exploring how his photographs gave visual form to emerging conceptions of childhood during the Victorian age.

By situating Carroll's photography within the broader context of Victorian visual and social culture, Waggoner reveals how he drew on images of childhood from painting and other media, while engaging with the visual language of the Victorian theatre, fancy dress, and Pre-Raphaelitism. She offers the first in-depth analysis of Carroll's photographing of boys, examining this within the context of boys' education and revealing it as a significant aspect of his photographic career.

Waggoner utilises a wealth of rare archival material to demonstrate how Carroll established new aesthetic norms for images of girls, engaged with evolving definitions of masculinity, and pushed the idea of childhood to its limits with the use of dress and nude images. This book uniquely illuminates Carroll's decades-long passion for photography, showing how his complex and haunting images of children embody the conflicting definitions of childhood. They remain powerful today in their ability to challenge, fascinate, and shock us.