Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden

The Viscountess Hawarden with the Scottish politician Donald Cameron of Lochiel , 1861

Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden (born June 1, 1822 in Cumbernauld Castle near Glasgow as Clementina Elphinstone-Fleeming ; † January 19, 1865 in South Kensington , London ), was a pioneer of photography in Victorian England.

Life

She was one of the five daughters of Royal Navy Admiral Charles Elphinstone-Fleeming (1774-1840) and Doña Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800-1880) from Cádiz , who was 26 years younger than her husband. She was raised appropriately and spent part of her childhood in Rome . Her education included literature and art history, among other things.

Hawarden married in 1845 the conservative politician Hon. Cornwallis Maude (1817-1905), who in 1857 inherited the title of 4th Viscount Hawarden and in 1886 was raised to 1st Earl de Montalt . The couple had eight daughters and two sons. Eight of the ten children reached adulthood. Cornwalli's son Maude, a captain in the Grenadier Guards , was killed in the battle of Majuba Hill in South Africa in 1881.

For the first 12 years of their marriage, the Maudes lived modestly in London. When Cornwalli's father died in 1857, that changed. The great inheritance of her father-in-law gave Clementina Maude the prosperity and thus the necessary leisure to turn to photography. In Ireland she learned the photographic technique. Lady Hawarden's early works mainly show stereotypical landscapes with little staff that were created around her Irish country residence at the time. In 1859 the Hawardens moved to London to a newly built house in the South Kensington district of Princes Gardens. At the time, many new residences were being built in South Kensington, it was also a center for exhibitions and institutions and a melting pot for science and the arts. Hawarden's major work, with almost 800 recordings, was created from this time on after the family moved to London.

She exhibited twice at the annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in London and was awarded the silver medal both times. In 1977 her work was exhibited at documenta 6 . She was admired by the writer Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), the painter and photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–1875) and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). The photographer Cindy Sherman (* 1954) names Lady Hawarden as one of her role models.

Hawarden died of pneumonia on January 19, 1865 at the age of 42.

Ninety percent of the overall work of Hawarden are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which is located in the same neighborhood as Hawardens onetime townhouse. In 1939, Hawarden's granddaughter donated her grandmother's works to the museum.

ca.1860, collodion, sepia, woman in front of mirror

ca.1860, collodion, sepia, woman dressed as a nun (?) stands next to a woman dressed as a pagan goddess (?)

plant

She gave her photos the title Studies . At first she photographed stereotypical landscapes in Ireland, later she started with portraits of her daughters. This is how a series of scenes from the upper class of the Victorian era emerged . In the course of time, the arrangements and compositions in terms of the posture of the models, the clothing, the mirrors used and the interior design became more and more sophisticated. The clothes became disguise. Hawarden worked with the available light ( Available Light ). Typical for her photos are high contrasts between the light and dark areas of the image. The mood of her photographs is romantic.

Clementina Hawarden can be seen as a kind of transition figure of the 19th century between the first, aristocratic amateur photographers of the forties and the professional art photographers of the sixties. Her use of light, shadow, cladding and props attests to Hawarden's in-depth knowledge of both photographic technology and the history of art, which she used in her work. The ambiguity of their images, their apparent narratives and the use of symbolic objects such as the mirror or the window leave plenty of room for interpretation. Nevertheless, she undoubtedly addresses controversial topics such as her adolescent daughters, their puberty, femininity and eroticism as well as her role as a woman in the Victorian contrast between the inner and outer world. Her work was influenced by portrait and genre painting, but should definitely be set apart from it. Hawarden certainly wanted to document reality - her daughters - but at the same time unconventionally explore the possibilities of the new art of photography, which makes her later work almost seem like experimental photography.

Lady Hawarden reveals herself to be a two-time pioneer. On the one hand, it stands in the tradition of British art, in the tradition of a romantic view of the world in the constantly changing 19th century , the rigid Victorian age and the epoch of the changeable industrial revolution . She was a pioneer for the still young technique of photography, which tried to establish itself as a recognized means of artistic expression in the middle of the century. On the other hand, she was a woman, a Victorian lady, tied to home and children. Her works were family photographs, intended for a domestic album, as countless middle-class families used.

It also paved the way for future photographers. In summary, there may be some comparisons, points of reference, and parallels between Hawarden and contemporary photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron , and later photographers, such as Cindy Sherman and Sally Mann . However, in addition to similarities in the portrayal and Hawarden's status as a role model in her function as a pioneer of photography, there is above all one point that makes her so interesting and attractive to this day: the depiction of puberty and adolescence, but above all the Femininity in itself - in its very own perspective and in the mirror of the Victorian view of the female sex. Your “studies from life” were ultimately just that - studies from life. She captured the growing up of her children, life itself, and using her artistic expertise and expressiveness, she also formulated an idea inherent in the photographed, a concept - in the sense of the artistic term of the study and the sketch as well as in the sense of the current of pictorialism . She captured a moment, an experience, a sense of life.

Photographic technique

Hawarden worked with the wet collodion technique, invented between 1850 and 1851 . Your negative was a glass plate, a collodion wet plate . The negative was developed in a solution of silver nitrate in the darkroom , pressed with the collodion side onto the albumin paper and developed using sunlight, so that a positive was created. Wet collodion plates, which are only used in exceptional cases today, were not and are not prefabricated. They have to be made by the photographer himself by carefully cleaning the glass plate and applying an even coating of a solution of collodion wool and iodine and bromine salts in ethanol and ether several times . The photographic plate , while still moist, has to be introduced into the large format camera in a light-tight cassette , exposed and developed as soon as possible.

Hawarden died with 42 years at a pneumonia . It is possible that the chemicals that attack the mucous membranes in the process she uses may have contributed to her early death.

literature

• Michael Bartram: The Pre-Raphaelite camera. Aspects of Victorian photography. London 1985.
• Patrizia di Bello: Sherman, Cindy. In: Robin Lenman (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to the photograph. Oxford 2005, col. 576-577.
• Virginia Dodier: Lady Hawarden, photographe victorien [exposition, presented to the Musée d'Orsay du 12 février on 29 avril 1990]. Paris 1990.
• Virginia Dodier: Clementina, Lady Hawarden. Studies from life 1857–1864. New York 1999.
• Doris Feldmann: Victorianism. An introduction to literature and cultural studies. Berlin 2013.
• Jane Fletcher: Staged photography. In: Robin Lenman (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to the photograph. Oxford 2005, col. 596-598.
• Mark Haworth-Booth: Photography, an independent art. Princeton 1997.
• Mark Haworth-Booth: The Return of Lady Hawarden. In: Virginia Dodier (Ed.): Clementina, Lady Hawarden. Studies from life 1857–1864. London 1999, pp. 110-115.
• Susanne Holschbach: From expression to pose. Theatricality and Femininity in 19th Century Photography. Berlin 2006.
• Birgit Jooss: Tableaux and attitudes as sources of inspiration for staged photography in the 19th century. In: Toni Stooss (Ed.): Role-playing games - role models. Munich 2011, pp. 14–49.
• Hope Kingsley: Collodion. In: Robin Lenman (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to the photograph. Oxford 2005, col. 130.
• Hope Kingsley: Pictorialism. In: Robin Lenman (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to the photograph. Oxford 2005, col. 500-502.
• Julie Lawson: Women in white. Photographs by Clementina Lady Hawarden. (Exhibition catalog Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 1997). Edinburgh 1997.
• Carol Mavor: Becoming. The photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden. Durham 1999.
• Carol Mavor: 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little'. Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden's Home as Camera Box. In: Lars Kiel Bertelsen (Ed.): Symbolic imprints. Essays on photography and visual culture. Aarhus 1999, pp. 65-87.
• Michael Meyer: The Pleasures of Men and the Subjection of Women. In: Christa Jansohn (Ed.): In the footsteps of Queen Victoria. Paths to the Victorian Age. Münster 2003, pp. 177-200.
• Maureen Moran: Victorian literature and culture. London 2006.
• Graham Ovenden: Clementina. Lady Hawarden. London 1974.
• Phyllis Ralph: Victorian transformations. Fairy tales, adolescence, and the novel of female development. New York 1989.
• Kimberly Rhodes: Hawarden, Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone (1822-1865). In: John Hannavy (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. London 2008, Vol. 1, pp. 641-643.
• Bernd Stiegler: Philology of the eye. The photographic discovery of the world in the 19th century. Munich 2001.
• Fritz Franz Vogel: The Cindy Shermans. Staged identities. Photo stories from 1840 to 2005. Cologne 2006.
• Marta Weiss: Staged Photography on the Victorian Album. In: Acting the part. photography as theater; [publ. on the occasion of the exhibition "Acting the part ..." organized by the National Gallery of Canada, and presented in Ottawa 16 June - 1 October 2006]. London 2006, pp. 83-99.

Web links

• Victoria and Albert Museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mike Merrit: lifestyle scotsman 2013. Retrieved March 24, 2013
2. ^ Victoria and Albert Museum , accessed March 24, 2013