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+--- Thread: Lewis Carroll's photography: Stolen kisses and naked girls (/thread-693.html)
Lewis Carroll's photography: Stolen kisses and naked girls - C C - Mar 31, 2015
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9478892/stolen-kisses-and-naked-girls-there-is-much-to-wonder-about-in-lewis-carrolls-wonderland/
EXCERPT: [...] Lewis Carroll, like many other Victorian ‘innocents’, was obsessed by the beauty and incorruptibility of young girls. The camera was a fairly recent invention. He used it to make images of girls dressed as princesses or beggars or — the clearest image of innocence — naked. Douglas-Fairhurst has fun — while making a serious point — with Carroll’s involuted letters to Alice’s mother (and other mothers) seeking permission to photograph their daughters. ‘On each occasion the correspondence turned into an elaborate dance of questions about how far they might go towards “absolute undress”.’ Douglas-Fairhurst shows that as Carroll insisted on the child’s ‘blissful unselfconsciousness’ his own writing became more selfconscious. Girls were variously ‘undraped’ or ‘undressed’; they were ‘in primitive costume’ or ‘Eve’s original dress’ or ‘their favourite dress of “nothing”.’ Douglas-Fairhurst remarks that Carroll’s increasingly elaborate attempts to avoid saying what he meant were ‘the rhetorical equivalent of a hand-tailored suit with a fancy waistcoat’. The book goes into both innocent examples of this love of little girls and an exploration of the dark alternatives to innocence. Douglas-Fairhurst points out that the looking glass makes everything double and reverses things....
RE: Lewis Carroll's photography: Stolen kisses and naked girls - Mr Doodlebug - Apr 2, 2015
Children don't have to be naked to be innocent.
And they certainly don't need "Uncles" hanging around to admire them.