Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822-1865) produced over eight
hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these
were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the
furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of
the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of
her London residence into a photographic studio--a private space
for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In
Carol Mavor's hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian
culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and
intimacy.
With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden's girls, becoming women,
entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine
objects (an Indian traveling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a
shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting
mise-en-scene is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably
queer--a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation,
as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs'
interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections
between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer,
Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and
twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman.
Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into
her work, Mavor contemplates the "experience" of the photograph and
considers the relationship of Hawarden's works to the concept of
the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and
doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor's voice unveils
the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden's images through a
writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as
sustained desire.
In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical,
Mavor's study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored
images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of
photography.
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