Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden

SYNOPSIS

Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822-1865) produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of her London residence into a photographic studio-a private space for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In Carol Mavor's hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy.

With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden's girls, becoming women, entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine objects (an Indian traveling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting mise-en-sc�ne is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably queer-a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation, as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs' interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman. Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into her work, Mavor contemplates the experience of the photograph and considers the relationship of Hawarden's works to the concept of the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor's voice unveils the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden's images through a writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as sustained desire.

In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical, Mavor's study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of photography.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Village Voice

Mavor pursues some intriguing paths in attempting to elucidate Hawarden's photographs. She is smart on the topic of teendom (just one of the 'becomings' of her title), and how it can surface not merely in the embrace of subject matter but in actual approach: adopting the unpredictability of adolescence can be an asset for adult photographers. Mavor also draws illuminating connections between the stereoscope and pornography, probes the nature of the family photo . . . and has a real flair for evoking and elucidating individual images, for helping us to envision the deep meaning she's admirably seeking.

Bay Area Reporter

Carol Mavor uses Clementina's life and art as a starting place to explore concepts of family and sexuality. . . . Becoming raises questions of intimacy and offers more questions than easy answers. The answers, it seems, are up to you.

ForeWord Magazine

Certain photographs, by virtue of composition, light, or subject, have the ability to draw a viewer into another world, to make one yearn for intimate knowledge of the photographer and the subject, to cause a kind of minor obsession of seeing, where simple viewing is never enough. The elegant and enigmatic photographs of Clementina, Vicountess Hawarden (1822-1865) possess this power, especially for Carol Mavor, whose passionate writing about the Victorian socialite's private work illuminates more than just a single important woman photographer whom history has overlooked. It also addresses a myriad of intermingled issues that the photographs invoke: gender, motherhood, sexuality, loss, illusion, and fetish. . . . Combining autobiography with scholarly study, Mavor is unflinchingly honest in describing how these images affect her . . . . Even when delving into how Hawarden can be compared to Vermeer or Lewis Carroll, Mavor maintains a gripping and breathless tone, inviting the reader into her beautiful compulsion and unveiling the gorgeous nuances behind Hawarden's portraits.

New Art Examiner