I was completely floored when, by chance, I first saw this photograph ‘Young Woman Smiling’; taken by the Portuguese pioneer of photography Carlos Relvas in 1886.
She looks out at us, playfully, through her fingers, and nearly a hundred and fifty years seems to fall away – she is so natural, so modern!
To use an English lens, she is so Un-Victorian – gone the stiffness normally associated with early portraits. And look at the sharpness of the image – it could have been taken on a modern camera.
And so we move to the second photograph. This time taken in England, by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1867.
I have always loved Cameron’s pioneering work – but perhaps for opposite reasons. She would deliberately blur the image in order that we, the viewer, move into an imaginative space. The soft focus of her pictures encourages us to dream!
They are high-Victorian, at home spiritually with the Pre-Raphaelites. Rather than collapsing time, they provide a window into the past.
I leave you with some more beautiful examples:
