People ask whether these were the first fashion photographs. Lady Clementina Hawarden took over 800 pictures mostly of her daughters. She converted the first floor of their London house into a studio, removing most of the period furniture to allow the creation of theme and mood through selection of minimal pieces and light. Many of her images use a chair, or mirror or a window.
775 of her images were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum by her grand-daughter in 1939. The images were ripped from the family albums leaving many with torn corners….
Carol Mavor in her book, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden writes extensively on Hawarden’s work but has met with opposition in her interpretations. Below is the inside book flap:
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-scène 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.
Lady Clementina Hawarden had eight children and died in her early forties.
Below is a Pinterest board collected by Alice Long of Lady Clementina Hawarden’s work.
Clementina Hawarden is an artist of immense skill. Her photographs are superb in their use of light and shadow. What a find, Elsa. And so inspiring.
Thank you Claire.. I think the images really stimulate the imagination.