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[Photographie] Lewis CARROLL

Photographie originale - Xie Kitchin

S.n., [Oxford] [août 1869], 14,9x20,8cm, une feuille sous marie-louise.

| technique becomes art: Lewis Carroll's famous child portraits with collodion |

Original photograph by Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson), rectangular albumen print. The tondo portrait of the little girl gives way to a particularly visible collodion emulsion, also bearing the number added by Carroll in the negative at top left. Discreet restoration at the ends of the plate, a diagonal fold in the upper left corner.
Extraordinary and probably unrecorded photograph of Lewis Carroll's favorite model, Xie Kitchin. This is one of the first portraits of his young muse, then aged 5, and one of the few retaining as much of the collodion emulsion peeling away from the edges of the glass negative - a deliberate artistic choice by Carroll.
The use of the collodion process, dubbed “black art” is in fact inseparable from Carroll's photographic practice. He had discovered photography with collodion, which was only five years old at the time. Carroll remained fiercely loyal to the process, which he described as “completely scientific and wonderfully mysterious”, requiring long exposures and tedious handling. In addition to being a practitioner, he also wrote a book on the subject, titled Photography Extraordinary; a skill which appealed to his inventor side. Twenty-three years later, in 1880, as he wrote in his memoirs, Carroll abandoned photography when the collodion technique disappeared, replaced by the dry plate. This extremely rare print bears witness to this complex technique, revealing the portrait of little Xie surrounded by a dark, tormented halo resulting from the chemical collodion reaction.
Carroll captures here one of his most famous little girls, who, along with Alice Liddell, has become the very symbol of his photographic work. The striking portrait reflects Carroll's Victorian views on the child, whose innocence stemmed from his relative temporal proximity to God, keeping him safe from sin and society's damaging effects. Alexandria “Xie” Kitchin, daughter of one of the writer-photographer's colleagues at Christ Church, would appear in no fewer than fifty of his pictures.  This portrait dates from their very first sessions and was probably taken in August 1869 in his Badcock's yard studio, at the same time as another portrait published in Taylor and Wakeling (2002, L:3, p. 229). In the latter, the girl photographed at the same age wears the same openwork lace dress as our photograph.
Provenance: Sotheby's London, 08/05/1992, lot no. 186. Not reproduced in Taylor and Wakeling (2002). Another known print was sold in 2023, in a smaller format, cropping the number added by Dodgson in the negative.
A marvellous example of Lewis Carroll's constant search for beauty, and a testament to his excellence in the practice of photographic art.