Books: Looking Backward Through the Lens

• Share

VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHS OF FAMOUS MEN AND FAIR WOMEN by JULIA MARGARET CAMERON 120 pages. David R. Godine. $20.

THE FAMILY ALBUM Assembled by MARK SILBER 93 pages. David R. Godine. $15.

IN THIS PROUD LAND by ROY STRYKER and NANCY WOOD 191 pages. New York Graphic Society. $15.

"There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the fac es that you meet." So wrote T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

But that was long ago, and photography has come a long way, baby. Film is more sensitive. Lenses are cleverer and faster. For years people have been bombarded by sneak shots, candid exposes, sensitive impressions of subway straps, flying tackles artfully half-arrested in motion, slick distortions like the famous photograph of Estes Kefauver's huge hand symbolically extended toward the voting public.

Lately it has been possible to seek relief from frenetic and kinetic imagery by looking backward. Publishers are now offering a string of new picture books filled with the ancient snapshot, the static portrait and the severe documentary. Some of them are a bit special: albums of Victorian children and antique pornography. More than nostalgia or a desire for escape is at work, however. Portraits, especially of anonymous folk from the otherwise dead past, exert a peculiar fascination. One broods over them, foolishly nodding and speculating about what the people were really Like and the lives they must have led.

There is a growing suspicion, too, amply borne out by these three books—one Victorian, one turn-of-the-century, one from the great Depression—that a special truthfulness resides in pictures produced by a photographer who confronts his subjects steadily and holds them in affection or awe.

Julia Margaret Cameron was a Victorian of great eccentricity, some means and considerable connections. She was born the year of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and did not take a picture until 1864, when her daughter and son-in-law gave her one of the earliest models, which consisted of two wooden boxes, one sliding inside the other. "It may amuse, Mother, to try to photograph," they wrote her fondly. Little did they guess. At first Mother could hardly tell the difference between treacle and collodion, the sticky fluid used to coat her glass negatives. But she had an eye and the kind of cast-iron ego that always stands a photographer in good stead. "Few could withstand the extreme fury of her affection," Virginia Woolf wrote in the preface to the first edition in 1926 of Victorian Photographs, recalling Mrs. Cameron, who was the aunt of her mother, Mrs. Leslie Stephen.