Exploring the Photography Legacy of Lewis Carroll: Beyond Alice in Wonderland

if I say the name Louis Carroll I’m assuming the first thing that comes to mind is Alice in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass but did you know that he was also a very accomplished photographer hi photo friends my name is Joe Geyer and I am a photography professor with 17 years of experience in the industry Charles L Dodgson also known as Louis Carroll was known for more than just the Alice in Wonderland series he was an accomplished photographer that did it for about 25 years in this 25 year career he ended up taking about 3,000 images that focused around landscape portraits and portraits of young women just a quick jump in as I’m editing this video I say young women several times but I meant to say young girls and I correct myself later on but just know that I meant young girls and not young women now his landscape and his regular porches were never considered to be remarkable in any way it was his portraits of young girls that really pushed him in the industry at the time one of his regular models he had in front of his camera was Alice Lidell who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and it is through many of the images of her and the other young girls that conversation revolves at this time in the Victorian era people were obsessed with the idea of childhood and innocence and so the conversations around these young girls focuses on the fact that they were so young and that they were nude to semi nude and often posed very suggestively many of these girls were between like 8 and 14 and what pushes the controversy especially from historians now at this point is that upon his death Dodgson had about half of his photographic work destroyed which makes a person question what his intentions were with the photographs that he had created I do want to also note here that these images were commissioned by the parents who were of middle or upper class wealth and they were done with consent from the parents now there is a contemporary photographer who has similar but different controversy around her images so if you wanna learn about her let me know so that I can make a video about her as well