Barringer, Tim. Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

Brown, Janet. “I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and His Body.” Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Nonesuch, 1939.

Corbett, David Peters. The World of Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848-1914. University Park: University of Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Cunningham, Hugh. “Histories of Childhood,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 4 Oct., 1998.

David, Ivan, ed. Eat, Drink & Be Merry: The British at Table 1600-2000. London: Philip Wilson, 2000.

Engen, Rodney. Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Night. London: Lund Humphries, 1991.

Frizot, Michel. A New History of Photography. New York: Konemann, 1999.

Higonnet, Anne. Lewis Carroll. London: Phaidon Limited, 2008.

Higonnet, Anne. “The History, Crisis, and Recovery of Ideal Childhood.” Presumed Innocence: Photographic Perspectives of Children. Massachusetts: DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 2008.

Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Ivan, David, ed. Eat, Drink & Be Merry: The British at Table 1600-2000. London: Philip Wilson, 2000.

Keller, Corey. “Sight Unseen: Picturing the Invisible.” Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Kimmelman, Michael. “D.I.Y. Culture,” New York Times, 14 April, 2010.

McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. A.A.E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Meyer, Susan E. A Treasury of the Great Children’s Book Illustrators. New York: Abradale Press, 1983.

Morris Hambourg, Maria, ed. The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1993.

Nead, Lynda. The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Olsen, Victoria C. From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Princeton: Yale University Press, 2000.

Pollock, Griselda. Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

Pollock, Griselda. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the History of Art. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Stern Shapiro, Barbara. Mary Cassatt: Impressionist at Home. New York: Universe Publishing, 1998.

Tickner, Lisa. Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Truss, Lynne. Tennyson’s Gift. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Tucker, Jennifer. “Objectivity, Collective Sight, and Scientific Personae.” Victorian Studies 50 (2008).

Tucker, Jennifer. “The Social Photographic Eye.” Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Wood, Christopher. Fairies in Victorian Art. London: Antique Collector’s Club, 2000.

Wullschlager, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland: Victorian Childhood as Seen Through the Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Through photography Carroll not only suspended a moment in time, he pinned it in place and enforced the moment’s permanence with the addition of several artistic mediums, such as text and drawings. Although his photographs pause a particular instant, the formal qualities of the images, the subjects and shapes, remain lively. Whether Alice Liddell appears to be slipping from the portrait frame or Agnes Weld looks as if she is about to walk into the forest, motion underlies Carroll’s photographic compositions and text. This dynamism emerges from the scale of the subjects trapped within the photographic frame, for the viewer recognizes that these subjects are miniaturized through the mechanics of photography, even though they appear to fit within their surroundings. One’s eye adjusts the subject to the appropriate context of the environment in order to render a realistic image and these subliminal adjustments are mobile.

Carroll’s photographs experimented with scale, as did his textual narratives, for the characters constantly transform and shift sizes. When Alice drinks the magic potion, she grows and shrinks spontaneously and uncontrollably. She is never the suitable size for Wonderland: when she grows, her gigantic tears create an ocean and a moment later, she shrinks again, only to find that she must swim against the powerful current of her own tears. Carroll controls the scale and environment of both the character Alice and Alice Liddell. By manipulating Alice’s size in relation to her environment, his photographs and text zoom in and out of 19^th-century modernity, examining his surroundings with scientific clarity and then quickly pulling back, blurring his environment with nonsensical prose and illustration. Carroll’s multimedial engagement with 19^th-century modernity positioned 20^th and 21^st-century British art.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can be considered one of the narratives of British modernism. Wonderland’s bewildering, sinister, and whimsical landscape exemplifies a 19^th-century version of utopia. Although this environment is somewhat dystopic, with its rude characters and nonsensical atmosphere, Wonderland’s intangibility subscribed to British modernism’s continual attempt to depict an unreachable and fantastical landscape. Although Carroll was not the first to employ such a mix of mediums (nor will he be the last), his invention of Wonderland and his experimentations in photography and prose provided British artists with an ideal and idea that was amorphous and could be appropriated time and time again. The Pre-Raphaelites conveyed the fictitious realms of Shakespeare’s poetics in acidic tones, Tenniel defined Wonderland in clear black and white lines, and Bloomsbury painters created compositions that relied on color and significant forms. The unifying element of these particular instances in British art is the artists’ combination of textual narrative and artistic practice. It is through this phantasmagoric mixture of mediums that British artists, including Carroll, conveyed and harnessed the fantasy and utopia of modernism.

Carroll’s phantasmagoric legacy still thrives, extending beyond early 20^th-century British art to the edible works of the contemporary British company, Bompas & Parr. Founded by two culinary architects, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, the company creates jelly molds in any imagined shape and size. Their works include a quivering, bright orange mold of St Paul’s Cathedral, ghostly glow in the dark jelly sculptures, and even a room consisting of vaporous gin and tonic that one walks through for an hour, inhaling the equivalent of one cocktail. Bompas & Parr’s synesthetic approach to architecture, sculpture, and culinary treats is similar to the disorientation and phantasmagoria of Wonderland. Their work exists outside the context of the restaurant or kitchen and within the confusing and fantastic realm of the rabbit hole, where things are topsy-turvy.

When inside Bompas & Parr’s gin and tonic gallery, one feels as wobbly and muddled as Alice herself felt when she tumbled down the rabbit hole (Figure 14). Alice’s description of her fall through the rabbit hole is full of detailed observations, for she is able to discern objects as they float by her, and even make choices to procure her own safety.[1] Unlike the rabbit hole, one cannot see as clearly as Alice when immersed in the gin and tonic room. However, one can draw parallels between Carroll’s text and the feelings of surprise and wonderment the room elicited. In the cloud of cocktail, a single light bulb hangs from the gallery like the ghostly appearance of Carroll’s Cheshire cat. The barely discernable smiles and exclamations of boozy gallery-goers seem to be suspended throughout the room and these crescent grins, like that of the Cheshire cat as well, mysteriously disappear and reappear, as visitors hour in the gallery is fulfilled and commenced.

The constructed alcoholic environment is pure fantasy and whimsy. One can imagine feeling as astonished as Alice did when she first noted the Cheshire Cat’s abrupt and mysterious character: “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”[2] Bompas & Parr’s work is curious and fun. The vaporous room evokes Carroll’s text, providing another instance where mist, text, food, art, and technology are inextricably bound to British modernism. Together, these distinctive mediums disorient viewers only to orient them for the possibility of Wonderland.

While Alice dreamt of her adventures in Wonderland, her sister read a book without pictures, by the bank of the stream. At the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s sister herself dreams. She looks upon Alice in the distance, and recalls the excitement of being young, realizing that Alice will one day grow up. Through the sister’s final reflection, her dream, Carroll instructs readers to remember their own childhood: “their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys.”[3] Alice’s sister and by extension Carroll, express a nostalgia for childhood innocence and wonder. True to Carroll’s phantasmagoric form, this longing is articulated through Alice’s sister’s dream and not through reality. Readers must navigate the text, the dream, the illustration, and the photograph in order to perceive the child-like utopia that Carroll imagines. Lisa Tickner explains that “modernism offers a kind of articulation or refraction of modern life, it does not mirror it (though its representations may, reflexively, structure our sense of it).”[4] Refraction and disorientation may be the only modes through which artists can depict the cultural practices and beliefs of modernization. By disorienting viewers, Carroll, the Pre-Raphaelites, and members of the Bloomsbury group, prepared beholders to assume a renewed vision of reality, one that finds humor, fantasy, and magic in everyday life. This renewed stance is the excited and eager vision of a child.

[2] Ibid., 94.

[3] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 92.

[4] Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, 185.

Wonderland: Illustrated and Defined

On July 4, 1860, Carroll and a male friend accompanied Edith, Lorina, and Alice Liddell on a boat trip. At the sisters’ insistence, Carroll told the story of a young heroine, named Alice, who follows a white rabbit with pink eyes down a rabbit hole while her elder sister reads a book—with no pictures—by the bank of a stream. Five years later, this story was illustrated, printed, bound, and distributed as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Unlike his photographic work, Carroll’s book was not his sole creation. After several attempts to depict the tale photographically and with his own drawings, the experimenter turned to Sir John Tenniel, a professional draughtsman, to illustrate the manuscript. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland marks a departure in Carroll’s creative pursuits: the narrative is too strange and bewildering to be represented photographically. Unlike his photographic portraits of close acquaintances, his book was meant to reach a public audience instead of the private audiences in friends’ sitting rooms, where his photographs had been circulated before. By employing Tenniel, Carroll attempts to produce a marketable product.

Originally entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the first version of the story was given by Carroll to Alice Liddell for Christmas in 1864. The manuscript ended with a pen-and-ink portrait of the character Alice, drawn by Carroll, which at some point was covered by a photograph of the seven-year-old, Alice Liddell (Figure 10). As an object and as an example of Carroll’s creative process, the last page of the Alice manuscript embodies modernity’s continued attempt to represent a utopian ideal. A machine did not print the manuscript: it was clearly drawn by Carroll’s own hand. The hand-written aesthetic lends itself to the non-technological side of British modernity, for the author’s neat handwriting remains unique and personal, unlike the scientific objectivity elicited by photography. Carroll could not submit himself to one artistic medium—handwriting or drawing—and pasted the photographic image of Alice at the bottom of the page, calling upon the insistently technological and realistic 19^th-century medium. By replacing his hand-drawn image of the character Alice on the final page of the manuscript with a photograph of Alice Liddell, Carroll carries on his artistic practice of phantasmagoric multimedia, producing an object that expressed 19^th-century British modernity’s range of representation.

The final page of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a meditation on the loss of youth. The narrative seems to instruct the readers—especially Alice, for whom the manuscript was designed—to hold dear the “simple joys… of happy summer days.” The text is sweet in its care and affection towards Alice Liddell’s innocence. On this page, Carroll writes how the elder sister imagines that one day the character of Alice will retell the stories of her adventures in Wonderland to other little children, “and make their eyes bright and eager with many a wonderful tale.”[1] The author encourages readers, especially Alice Liddell, to maintain a sense of childlike innocence and wonder in spite of the reality of growing up. Similar to his portraits of the Liddell girls and Whipple’s daguerreotype of the moon, Carroll cut the photograph of Alice into an oval and pasted it at the bottom of the page, thus fixing and presenting the reader with a distinct instance of her youth. In a swirly, hand-drawn design, he frames the oval portrait. The top of the oval separates the last two words of the passage, “summer” and “days,” creating an awkward space. In order to finish the sentence, and consequently the book, the reader is forced to look upon Alice’s photograph. Instead of simply reading the text, the reader is drawn by the sinuous curve of the oval-shaped photograph and directed towards this clear image of Alice’s childhood. The photograph and text suspend the reader’s attention and the summer of Alice Liddell’s youth.

The portrait of Alice Liddell on the last page of Carroll’s manuscript reveals a quiet image of her childhood. She gazes calmly at the photographer. Unlike the portrait from 1857 where she is slumped against the wooden chair, Alice is neither slipping out of the picture frame nor out of focus in this image. Carroll has contained the spirit of Alice; her features are clear and distinct. In typical, flirtatious form, Alice tilts her chin down, stares directly at the photographer, and barely parts her lips, as if she is about to say something. By pairing it with this particular text, a narrative that instructs readers, including Alice, to retell the fantasies of childhood, Carroll gives readers visual instructions for responding to the book’s final reflection.

Before commissioning Tenniel for the production of the manuscript, Carroll illustrated the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even borrowed a book on natural history in order to render the details of animals accurately. His illustrative aesthetic appears to emulate the frizzy tresses and wide eyes of Pre-Raphaelite women, and falls short, as seen in one illustration of the character Alice. This drawing depicts one of her rapid growth spurts while she is trapped inside the White Rabbit’s home (Figure 11).[2]. In Carroll’s drawing, Alice is stuffed into a small compositional frame. The scale of her body is inconsistent: her face and wavy hair are too large in comparison to her short arms, and the absence of her neck creates a peculiar illusion of disembodiment. In an effort to manufacture the story, Carroll decided that woodcuts and the assistance of a professional would solve the problems of his amateur drawings and issues of reproduction. He greatly admired the work of John Tenniel, whose caricatures he had seen in the weekly satirical magazine Punch. Tenniel’s drawings often possessed a gruesome, anthropomorphic effect and he had an ability to synthesize what Carroll called “the pretty” with “the grotesque.”[3] He commissioned the professional draughtsman for his ability to convey these disparate aesthetics, for the combination of the two is characteristic of the nonsensical atmosphere of Wonderland.

Carroll and Tenniel’s working relationship was strained although they both tried to remain business-like for the sake of the publication. Each man had different artistic visions and methods. For instance, whereas actual people inspired Carroll, Tenniel preferred to work from imagination and did not use models. In an effort to maintain some control over the visual construction of Wonderland, Engen has written that Carroll, “sent Tenniel his own rough sketches and occasional photographs for models, but these were generally ignored since Tenniel, as always, declined models of any kind.”[4] Despite Tenniel’s refusal to use Carroll’s photographic models, the author maintained a courteous relationship with the illustrator for the sake of the book’s production.

Tenniel’s clear woodcuts orient Alice’s readers by rendering Wonderland’s nonsense in crisp detail. By comparing Tenniel’s version of Alice’s growth spurt inside the White Rabbit’s home to Carroll’s, one sees the illustrator’s clear handle on scale—even if this scale was fantastical (Figure 12). Here, Alice lies on the floor with her right arm thrust out the window, and tilts her head forward in an effort to avoid the close ceiling. She looks up anxiously, providing a convincing image to accompany Carroll’s text: “as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself ‘Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?”[5] Tenniel provides the reader with the entire environment in this scene, and unlike Carroll he includes the White Rabbit’s home as well. By establishing a sense of space, the illustrator creates a realistic sense of Alice’s gigantic scale at this moment. Carroll’s drawing of Alice in this scene was simply crunched into a floating space and the viewer had no architectural context to situate her growth. Tenniel creates the perspective of Wonderland, sketching the walls and furnishings of the White Rabbit’s home, and in so doing constructs the previously unseen landscape of Wonderland.

Just as Carroll’s photographic portrait of Alice Liddell presented and fixed an image of the child within a Victorian setting, Tenniel’s depictions of the character Alice defined her form against the landscape of Wonderland. Throughout the woodcuts, Alice’s size is constantly shifting in comparison to her surroundings. Never the right size for Wonderland: Alice shrinks, grows, and stretches. As Marina Warner explains in reference to Victorian culture more generally, “In an era where the photographic media’s omnipresence cannot be overestimated, children’s fiction tackles the double, or multiple, or multiple worlds opened by mirrors and lenses.”[6] In order to depict Alice’s elusive form, it seems, Tenniel assumes the position of the eye of a camera, zooming in and out, so that at sometimes the background appears compressed against Alice’s body and while at others, Wonderland seems to expand infinitely. Once again, the background of Tenniel’s woodcut, orients the reader by creating a perspective that is similar to the one Alice must be experiencing. Tenniel’s invention of Wonderland cleverly places the reader within the scope of Alice’s trials so that one must share Alice’s anxiety, bewilderment, and excitement. Oriented by the same perspective of Alice, readers are accompanied as they traverse the text. The strangeness of the creatures and rules encountered in Wonderland are no longer as sinister.

Unlike Carroll’s photographic portrait of Alice Liddell, Tenniel did not model his version of Alice from an actual person. The illustrated image of the character Alice is invented (Figure 13). Here, one sees Alice before her first metamorphoses. She stands by the three-legged glass table, holding a small bottle, with the words “DRINK ME” printed on its paper label. Like an image of Pre-Raphaelite woman, the illustrated version of Alice is wide-eyed, with long, blond tresses, falling below her shoulders in a controlled fashion. The ever-allusive Alice Liddell wore her slick brown hair above her shoulders. It seems that by changing artistic mediums, shifting from photography to woodcuts, the character of Alice could be depicted in an idealized form: still, clear, Pre-Raphaelite-esque, and contained.

Tenniel’s depiction of Alice appears both childish and adult. Her large head dwarfs her body, which, in comparison, is small and contained by her Victorian costume. It is almost as if her body has not grown into her head, and once again, her scale is not fixed. By creating images of Alice that depict her body both as a child and as an adult Tenniel establishes a temporal sense of scale that mirrors Alice’s transformations through Wonderland. Just as Carroll’s photograph of Agnes Weld exists in a phantasmagoric and liminal state, Tenniel’s woodcut of Alice is amorphous. One cannot determine her exact age by looking at the image. Her face, inquisitively looking at the “drink me” bottle, is mature, yet her flowing tresses and short gown clearly mark her as a Victorian child.

The notion of scale underlies Carroll’s text and consequently, Tenniel’s drawings. Alice’s body shrinks and grows throughout the text, her size, controlled by the nonsensical props and rules of Wonderland. Whether she experiments with the liquid contents of the bottle on the glass table or she fans herself to keep from crying, Alice’s scale in relation to Wonderland’s environment always exists temporally. Visually depicting this ephemeral and nonsensical scale produced frightening images of Alice, such as the first drawing from “The Pool of Tears” (Figure 13). After eating the cake, in an effort to become the size of a reasonable person, Alice’s cries: “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye feet!”[7] Tenniel elongates her neck to make it appear like the cylinder of a telescope. Her prim collar stretches to the middle of her neck, with sharp lines moving downward, expressing the tension her rapid growth is creating between the fabric and her body. The draughtsman creates a terrifying and grotesque image of Alice, for not only is her body monstrous in its new form, taking on the characteristics of a strange animal, her wide-eyes and curled hair—which previously seemed to emulate the ethereal presence of a Pre-Raphaelite beauty—now appears as Medusa.

Carroll’s reference to the telescope and Tenniel’s depiction of Alice’s telescopic body, engage with 19^th-century inventiveness and opticality. It seems as though Carroll could not escape mechanical ways of seeing, as exemplified in his photographic practice and his characterization of Alice’s immense growth and altered state to that of a telescope. When Alice grows in this scene, her vision from above alters her perception and relation to her body. “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for your now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you…”[8] Alice’s size and inability to function within her own body makes her transformation a spectacle, for the readers and for herself. She shrieks “curiouser and curiouser” in exclamation, not even speaking proper English, and the reader is jolted by Tenniel’s monstrous depiction of her elongated body. The telescope metaphor encourages the character Alice and readers to re-evaluate their perception in order to move forward: Alice must do so in order to shrink back to her natural size and Carroll’s contemporary readers must do so in order to reconcile the expansiveness of 19^th-century modernity.

Drawing seems to allow readers to be more comfortable with the abrupt and nonsensical elements of Wonderland. Readers are aware, through the clear black and white lines of Tenniel’s drawings that the images do not reveal or document reality—they are the imaginings of the draughtsman. The fact that Tenniel worked from within his studio heightens the fantastic and imaginative quality of his illustrations, for their parts were never gathered through outdoor study, like that of the Pre-Raphaelites, or inspired by actual models, such as Alice Liddell. Carroll’s decision to employ Tenniel instead of composing his own photographs to accompany the text created a marketable product. The medium of photography, despite its ability in the 19^th-century to reveal the invisible, would have posed a multitude of problems for Carroll’s Wonderland. Alice’s telescopic neck is just one example. Photographing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would likely be too terrifying for readers, especially since this book was intended for small children.

[2] Carroll was an avid illustration collector. His collection included Seymour, Cruikshank, Noel Paton’s classical Shakespearean illustrations, Richard Doyle’s King of the Golden River, toy book artists like Randolphe Caldecott and Kate Greenaway’s imitator T. Pym. He owned The Germ, which was photographed by Rosetti, several Burne-Jones drawings, and paintings by Rosetti and Arthur Hughs.

[3] Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight, 69.

[4] Ibid., 73.

[5] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 45.

[6] Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, 208.

[7] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 15.

[8] Ibid., 16.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Materiality, Artifice, and Technology

Although the Liddell sisters were Lewis Carroll’s most famous muses, they were not the only girls he photographed during the summer of 1857. In late August, less than two months after he created their portraits, Carroll composed an image of Agnes Weld that marks a significant departure from the straightforward style he had employed earlier that summer (Figure 6). With Lorina and Alice, his photographic aesthetic was still firmly grounded in what Higonnet has termed the “assumption of photography’s mechanical neutrality.”[1] His image of Agnes abandons all pretenses to scientifically examine a Victorian child; it disguises Agnes as a character from a storybook scene. Against a thick ivy wall, clutching a breadbasket in her right hand and the hem of her dark cloak in her left, she is costumed as the fabled Little Red Riding Hood. This photograph exists in a place of liminality, between reality and fantasy, stillness and motion, and expresses the disorientation of Carroll’s fall down the rabbit hole.

This sense of liminality can usefully be understood through the bewildering and fantastic notion of phantasmagoria, characterized by animation, ghostly apparitions, and the substance of dreams.[2] Just like the variant elements and materials that can define phantasmagoria, Carroll’s portrait of Agnes Weld dressed as Little Red Riding Hood employed several mediums—text, photography, and costume—to express the liminality and strangeness of 19^th-century modernism. Nineteenth century modernity can usefully be considered a place of liminality, like that of Carroll’s rabbit-hole, because it marks a threshold in Victorian life. Lisa Tickner explains, “Between 1875 and 1900 there was something like a quantum leap in scientific discoveries and new technologies, and an acceleration in existing processes of secularization, rationalization, imperial expansion and state intervention.”[3] Just as new technologies and processes in secularization and thought characterized 19^th-century modernity, Carroll’s approach to photography was multimedial for this mode best expressed the spectacle and phantasmagoria of Victorian life.

Of her book, Marina Warner explains: “modernity did not by any means put an end to the quest of spirit and the desire to explain its mystery; curiosity about spirits of every sort… and the ideas and imagery which communicate their nature have flourished more vigorously than ever since the seventeenth century, when the modern fusion of scientific inquiry, psychology, and metaphysics began.”[4] This notion of phantasmagoria can be applied to Carroll’s image of Agnes Weld dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. The photographer’s multimedia approach expresses Warner’s sentiments about modernity’s desire to explain mystery, for Carroll employed a scientific medium, photography, in order to create an expression of a fictitious tale, that of Little Red Riding Hood. The photographer’s phantasmagoric engagement with modernity provided the structure for his fall down the rabbit hole into the textual and illustrated world of Wonderland. The photograph of Agnes Weld presents a strange image of the young girl—she looks as if she has just seen a phantasm. Similar to Alice Liddell’s portrait, she pushes her chin down and looks up at the photographer: the whites of her eyes glow with spectral curiosity. Has she just seen a ghost—or, more likely, the Big Bad Wolf? Carroll’s interest in spirits and the intangible is brought to the surface by combining different mediums, for, in this manner, the experimenter revealed the paradoxes of phantasmagoric modernism.

The photograph of Agnes Weld exhibits a particular shift in Carroll’s projected locus of childhood innocence and wonder. Rather than being contained within the body of an actual Victorian child, the source of wonder is now found within the body of a Victorian child at play. Within this imaginative realm, the child’s innocence is unobtainable: a utopia that adults cannot enter by function of experience. Carroll’s age and knowledge blocks him from ever assuming this state of blissful innocence. It seems that in attempt to gain access to such imaginative moments, Carroll played alongside Agnes. He constructed a narrative composition, one that is inspired by a well-known fairy tale, and left 19^th-century scientific objectivity behind. Here, Agnes’ dark cape falls just below her knees, exposing pristine white stockings and lustrous, black-buttoned boots. Her hood falls like a limp halo at the crown of her head, pushing her ringlets forward. The effect of the fallen halo foreshadows the fable’s narrative, symbolically referring to the young girl’s dangerous decision to talk to strangers in dark woods.

The photograph’s stark shadows and forms suggest the darker aspects of children’s storytelling and play. The dramatic shadow cast by the ominous ivy wall makes the light features of the composition stand out. Agnes’ pale face is among the photograph’s only light components: it shares the luminosity of her pressed dress and the bread rolls. Carroll’s attention to the formal qualities of the photograph signals a greater self-consciousness in his artistic abilities than he had demonstrated with the portraits of Lorina and Alice Liddell. He finds nuance in the materials at hand, such as the glare of the ivy leaves and the whiteness of Agnes’ haunting gaze. Even her outstretched foot points in the same direction as the leafy foliage, making her appear to be ready to walk bravely into the forest and out of the picture frame. The Little Red Riding Hood fable is frightening and the image’s forms and shadows echo this sentiment. At the fable’s climax, a wolf is disguised as a sweet grandmother, snarling and ready to eat little girls who talk to strangers.

Both photographer and child seem to be trapped and controlled by 19^th-century societal constructions: the space of the manicured garden, the innocence of childhood, and the experience of adulthood. The ivy wall metaphorically bars the photographer from entering the state of wonderment that Agnes is able to assume as she stands before the camera, playing pretend. Like the impenetrable wall of a fortress, the ivy separates the photographer, and consequently the viewer, from leaving the enclosure of the garden and gaining full access to Agnes’ imagination and conception of the fable. The wall also signifies the expanse and limits of the imagination—even the imagination of a child—for Agnes is confined to the English garden. While she might be playing the role of Little Red Riding Hood, envisioning the dark wood and dangerous wolf, she cannot literally leave the enclosed garden—for fear that she may meet a fate similar to that of Little Red Riding Hood. The ivy wall preserves and contains Agnes’ presumed childhood innocence, disallowing the photographer and viewer from entering the dreamy world of her imagination. From Agnes’s vantage point, the photographer seems to play the part of the Big Bad Wolf. By pointing his lens intently at her, the viewer realizes that his hunger to enter the world of Wonderland was palpable.[5]

A phantasmagoric mix of artistic mediums characterizes this image of Agnes, for Carroll composed his own text in response to the photograph. The Oxford don wrote: “Into the wood—the dark, dark wood—/ Forth went the happy Child/ And in it’s [sic] stillest solitude/ Talked to herself and smiled;/ And closer drew the scarlet Hood/ About her ringlets wild […]”[6] One can speculate that Carroll’s prose allows him to examine childhood imagination, make-believe alongside Agnes.. By invoking an accepted medium, such as text, Carroll managed to authorize and legitimize his investigation into childhood play. Agnes clearly did not smile for the photographer and, in fact, looks possessed. Perhaps Agnes was so in engrossed pretending to be Little Red Riding Hood that the terrifying narrative overcame her. Carroll’s poem, inspired by the image, projects a more cheerful version of Little Red Riding Hood onto Agnes. “Forth went the happy Child… Talked to herself and smiled,” Carroll writes. He literally re-writes the fable in order to create a narrative for this particular image and in doing so he inserts himself into the story. Extending beyond the photographic lens, his investigation into the construction of 19^th-century childhood begins to mirror the playfulness and spirited creativity of children at play: writing poems and constructing narrative compositions that reveal the wonderment of childhood instead of presenting the child as a scientific specimen.

Playing alongside Agnes Weld, Carroll adopts a similar sense of eagerness. One sees this earnestness expressed in the makeshift props used to establish the narrative and his accompanying poem. His portrait of Agnes Weld echoes the claims of his contemporary, the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire, who described the painter of modern life as one who sees the world through the excited curiosity and innocence of a child. He does so by invoking the childhood memories of an artist-friend, who describes watching his father dress each morning with intense curiosity and focus. In this way, the friend Baudelaire refers to, found beauty within the seemingly mundane. Baudelaire writes:

A friend of mine once told me that when he was quite a small child, he used to be present when his father dressed in the morning, and that it was with a mixture of amazement and delight that he used to study the muscles of his arms, the gradual transitions of pink and yellow in his skin, and the bluish network of his veins.[7]

The art critic equates children’s ability to focus on (or be possessed by) the ordinary to the creativity of an artist by adding, “Need I add that today that child is a well-known painter?”[8] Carroll appears to have felt this same “mixture of amazement and delight” when constructing his composition of Agnes Weld. Possessed by the possibility of wonder, he cannot contain his focus to one medium, instead channeling his creativity into two: photography and text. Baudelaire’s passage situates Carroll’s work within the historical and cultural context of the late 19^th century.

The mixture of visual media and text is not exclusive to Carroll in the 19^th-century. In fact, many compositions by a group of mid-nineteenth-century British painters known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were accompanied by text and inspired by photographic ways of seeing. Founded in 1849 by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was deeply influenced by photography’s invention and its ability to reveal natural forms in exquisite detail.[9] It seems, in the cases of both Carroll and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that fantasy expressed itself in several mediums. Through this phantasmagoric mix of artistic practices, the Pre Raphaelites legitimized colorful, fantastical paintings that may have otherwise seemed silly and frivolous just as Carroll grounded the fictitious narrative of Agnes Weld’s image in the scientific medium of photography and the antiquity of text. Similar to the tricky and disorienting nature of Carroll’s photographs—at once creepy, fictional, and seemingly documentary—Pre-Raphaelite paintings are characterized by what Tim Barringer has termed “combination of a yearning for the past and an intensely modern, mid-nineteenth-century realism.”[10] This yearning, navigated by 19^th-century methods of examination, echoes Carroll’s investigation into childhood innocence and wonder.

The Pre-Raphaelites painted in a hyperreal style that was photographic in its clarity, with every detail enhanced and revealed. They adhered to studies made directly from nature and, as a result, the details in their work are visionary and “almost hallucinatory” in their realism.[11] Painted in 1851-2, John Everett Millais’ oil-on-canvas work entitled Ophelia exemplifies their objective and scientific approach to visual expression as well as their use of textual narratives (Figure 7).[12] The painting depicts a scene from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Ophelia’s corpse floats tragically atop a stream, her hair and dress billow outwards, and green algae creeps towards her. Like Carroll’s image of Agnes, the painting is inspired by a specific textual narrative: “There is a willow grows aslant a brook,/ That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;/ There with fantastic garlands did she come/ Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples.” In Millais’ painting of Ophelia, one can see each plant Shakespeare referenced in absolute detail. Millais studied plants outdoors, in nature, and subsequently painted a multitude of identifiable species and plants, in order to produce a convincing composition. While Carroll employs the objective realism of the photographic medium to ground Little Red Riding Hood’s narrative, Millais creates exact replicas of foliage to produce a convincing composition of a fictional tale.

Pre-Raphaelitism emerged at a time of industrialization, urban growth, railways, and photography. The Pre-Raphaelites followed the advice of their contemporary, the art critic John Ruskin, who encouraged artists to study natural forms outdoors, emphasizing that “inherited traditions of visual representation should be displaced by careful, direct drawing from motif.”[13] Ruskin’s claim influenced the Pre-Raphaelites’ painterly methods for they painted experientially, outside, to render realistic depictions of nature. By creating meticulous studies of plants, the artists assumed the mechanical clarity and objectivity of modern optical devices, such as cameras and microscopes. The act of mastering observations empirically and by hand connected the Pre-Raphaelites kinetically to the natural world: to sketch a flower or blade of grass impeccably was surely comforting in the face of rapid mechanization and urban expansion. Through the medium of painting, they preserved and contained the purity and innocence of nature, before it became coated in a thick layer of coal and pollution.[14]

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, painted in 1849-50 by Millais, is likewise photographic in its immediate detail, clarity, and hyperrealism (Figure 8). The foliage providing the backdrop to the scene is a bright, green—every blade of grass glistens in the sunlight. Ferdinand leans toward the fairy Ariel, who tilts Ferdinand’s white cap and whispers. Although the viewer cannot hear Ariel’s words, they are provided by the title of the work and the symbolic, theatrical composition.[15] Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Millais depicts the scene where Ferdinand wonders: “What should this music be? I’ the air or the earth?” Ferdinand’s exclamation articulates the phantasmagoric quality of Millais’ historical moment. In the context of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and 19^th-century British modernity, Millais seems to articulate the underlying thoughts of Victorian society through Ferdinand’s confusion. Where is all this technology coming from? The air? The earth? Ariel’s song, like the amorphous nature 19^th-century modernity, is intangible and disorienting. The elusive melody is neither contained by the dry paint on the canvas nor recognizable from Ferdinand’s known reality. It exists within a liminal space—like the rabbit hole—between the modern world and Wonderland.

The Pre-Raphaelites incorporated scientific ways of seeing into their paintings as a way of engaging with modernity from a safe distance. Their compositions, not insistently technological given their painterly media, maintain a sense of wonder and fantasticality while simultaneously involving to 19^th-century, scientific ways of seeing. For instance, Millais depicts the vegetation with microscopic accuracy, illuminating the details of each form, just as photography revealed elements that were previously invisible to the unaided eye. The magical quality of both the Brotherhood’s work and Carroll’s photographic composition creates the ideal medium for exploring such amorphous notions of fantasy, fiction, and Wonderland. The combination of mediums seems to express the bewilderment that was elicited from the inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution. Notions of phantasmagoria define these artists place within the context of modern materials’ the combination of several mediums produced works as amorphous and befuddling as 19^th-century inventions.

Textual narrative underlies these compositions, for the artists seem to employ this relatively ancient form of communication in order to validate the fantastical themes in their works. Carroll’s image of Agnes as Little Red Riding Hood and Millais’ paintings of Shakespeare’s prose were serious artistic pursuits and cannot to be written off as a trite photograph of a young girl or a pretty picture of a fairy. One sees that the artists dealt with fiction in a serious manner, rooting its fantasticality in clearly defined forms, studied from nature, and text. This sense of focus, as Baudelaire noted, is a defining feature of artists and brings the seemingly disparate works of Carroll and Millais together. Instead of a singular artistic medium, the phantasmagoric modes of creativity characterize both Carroll and Millais’ work for they shared an interest in fantasy and wonder.

Carroll’s use of different artistic modes establishes a historical context for early 20^th-century British modernism. The Bloomsbury group, British modernism’s self-proclaimed prophets, is a corporeal manifestation of Carroll’s artistic endeavors. Each member of the Bloomsbury Group can be considered a medium and, once the group’s work is viewed and considered as a whole, one sees that Bloomsbury was clearly influenced by Carroll’s openness to multiple, modern, artistic pursuits. Bloomsbury would not have been Bloomsbury without the collaborative efforts of Virginia Woolf (a writer), Duncan Grant (a painter), Roger Fry (an art critic), and Vanessa Bell (a painter). While Carroll combined photography, text, and illustrations in order to construct the landscape of Wonderland, members of the Bloomsbury Group lived and worked together, sharing ideas and concepts, so that their body of work mirrored the phantasmagoric quality of Carroll’s experiments.[16]

In Orlando, published in 1928, Virginia Woolf writes, “What phantasmagoria the mind is, and the meeting-place of dissembles.” This sentiment, expressed some seventy years after Carroll’s early photographic experiments, articulates the amorphous and mysterious quality of the mind, art, and modernity. Woolf’s voice becomes yet another medium which viewers of Carroll’s work can recall positioning his photographs within the greater context of British modernism. In phantasmagoric form, Woolf’s voice becomes a specter from the future: one reads the text and channels her sonic apparition. Carroll’s photography can usefully be seen as another meeting-place of dissembles, for it conceals the truth (the documentary aspects of the scene) and becomes a site where fantasy is revealed and contained. What phantasmagoria modernism is, and a meeting place of disparate mediums. Through the work of both Carroll and the Pre-Raphaelites, it is clear that engaging with 19^th-century modernity was a matter of uniting various artistic modes.

[2] Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria.

[3] Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects, 190.

[4] Warner, Phantasmagoria, 10.

[5] If Carroll is considered the Big Bad Wolf, one must remember that the wolf is killed at the end of the story, implying that the photographer’s attempts to capture the dream-like state of children’s imagination were futile.

[6] Anne Higonnet, Lewis Carroll. Plate 10.

[7] Baudelaire, as quoted in Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 96.

[8] Ibid., 96.

[9] The formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood occurred mere ten years after the invention of photography. William Michael Rossetti, Frederic George Stevens and Thomas Woolner joined the group soon after it was founded.

[10] Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, 8.

[11] Ibid., 8.

[12] Elizabeth Sidell, wife of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, was the model for Millais’ Ophelia. Carroll took many portraits of the Brotherhood’s children, including photographs of Mary Hunt Millais (one of Millais’ daughters) and Arthur Hugh’s family.

[13] Ruskin, as quoted in Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, 56.

[14] The notion of things disappearing and somehow fixing them through an artistic medium—like prose, paint, and song—is not exclusive to Shakespeare, Carroll or Millais. In 1976, The Band released the song “Ophelia” to great acclaim. Songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson penned the tune, which goes: “Ashes of laughter/ The ghost is clear/ Why do the best things always disappear?/ Like Ophelia…”

[15] Just as the Little Red Riding Hood narrative is exhibited through the makeshift props and title of the photograph.

[16] Members of the Bloomsbury group all took photographs of one another, creating a visual archive of their modern, quotidian experience.

Before the Rabbit Hole: Early Experimentations in Photography

In the summer of 1857, Lewis Carroll photographed two girls: Lorina and Alice Liddell (Figure 1). Taken the same day, the two portraits depict a five year old and an eight year old, seated facing the photographer at a wooden chair with their hands clasped at their waist. Although the compositions are nearly identical, the sitters’ poses suggest different personalities. Lorina encapsulates the propriety of Victorian life while Alice exudes a tantalizing playfulness. The portraits epitomize Carroll’s engagement with the paradoxical and dynamic nature of 19^th-century modernity, a cultural construction that, at its heart, was marked by both the mechanic and supernatural. Carroll’s photographs of the Liddell sisters, along with the 3,000 other photographs he produced, are rooted in the scientific discourse of 19^th-century photography and demonstrate the conviction common in the Victorian era that the medium of photography could expose, present and contain the invisible.[1]

The image of Lorina Liddell is rendered in sharp focus, with her stern expression, hair, skin and ruffled dress captured in exquisite detail. Although Lorina sat still, enabling Carroll to create a clear and focused portrait, She seems uncomfortable being photographed. Her stilted posture makes her appear to loathe sitting for Carroll—or any for photographer. Her discomfort may be a function of the wet collodion print process that Carroll practiced; this early photographic method was slow, exposures often took longer than forty-five seconds and neck clamps were used to keep sitters motionless. Each print required several chemical solutions.[2] Lorina’s body appears to be seized by Carroll’s lens: clenched and lifeless under the oppressively lengthy examination and process of the wet-collodion print.

Even though the portraits were taken the same day and in the same setting, they differ. Alice is blurry and the left half of the frame is overexposed, washed out. Unlike Lorina, who sits upright in her wooden chair, she is slightly slumped. A fold in the fabric of her dress creates a dark shadow and demonstrates just how far back Alice has leaned. Her posture appears to have more attitude and life than that of Lorina; her posture seems to convey to Carroll that if she must sit still for forty-five seconds, she needs to be comfortable. She does not frown and instead looks as if she were amused by the attention she is receiving. Her relaxed expression shows no sense of discomfort with the photographic process. In comparison to Lorina, Alice appears to be a natural sitter: slouching, restless, teasing, and playful.[3]

In this image Alice engages with the photographer. She tilts her chin down and looks up, flirtatiously shooting her gaze at Carroll. Her look is playful, as if she is challenging Carroll to a staring contest. Her spirited posture is tantalizingly free compared to that of Lorina, and to the stuffiness of Victorian society. She almost teases Carroll, and consequently the viewer, to look carefully and to stay a moment longer, before she slips away. The hazy, overexposed portion of the print, the section that casts a harsh light on Alice’s right side, makes it seem as if she could disappear at any moment and tumble head first down the rabbit hole. The effort to contain movement is central to the discourse of 19^th-century photography and the portraits of Lorina and Alice, exhibit a desire to suspend time by fixing a particular moment on a photographic plate.

Geoffrey Batchen refers to this 19^th-century effort as the “aspiration of permanence,” which, he explains, “looms large” in the invention of photography.[4] Through the medium of photography, Carroll distilled a fleeting moment and fixed it to paper. Once photographs were exposed and stabilized in a fixing solution of silver nitrate, the prints were framed. Just as the character Alice fell slowly down the rabbit hole, the image of Alice Liddell presents the viewer with the suspended period of the exposure. In the book that Alice herself inspired, he wrote: “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.”[5] The image captures not only a particular instant but also a moment when Alice, technically, grew older. The textual and photographic characters of Alice articulate slow-moving time, looking, and wonder. In the image, Alice looks directly at Carroll, perhaps wondering how long she can hold still and maintain his attention. The photographer wonders, meanwhile, how he might capture Alice’s childhood innocence in a photograph. Despite his attempt to fix an image of  Alice to the glass plate, the edges of the exposure remain blurry. She slips into the rabbit hole. It seems the only thing left for Carroll to ponder was the futility of capturing a sharp and clear instance of childhood.

The Liddell portraits represent Carroll’s initial examination into the construction of Victorian childhood. Their insistent objectivity, exhibited through their plain aesthetic, transforms the photographs into a scientific pursuit; the composition can be repeated infinitely and examined empirically by the photographer and others. For Lorina and Alice might substitute another Victorian child, seat the child on the chair, and photograph different versions of childhood. Carroll produced images of childhood dressed up: fussy fabrics, layers of petticoats, prim ringlets. He did not compose photographs of Lorina and Alice in a childish state, for the girls not depicted at play. Although his portraits of the young girls are dressed up, these early photographic experiments are not fantastic. There are no costumes, no glitter, no mirrors, and no mist. Instead, the two children are dressed in their quotidian, Victorian clothing, holding still for forty-five seconds.

The Liddell portraits operate as foils to the photographic work of Carroll’s contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, which likewise depict Victorian childhood stand in opposition to Carroll’s objectivity and photographic realism. In 1872, Cameron took a photograph of a young girl, Rachel Gurney, dressed as an angel (Figure 2). Costumed in feathered wings and with disheveled hair, Cameron’s angel looks as if she just landed from the heavens. The image is theatrical and overtly staged: a studio portrait characterized by the dramatic effects of blurriness and lenses. Rachel rests her chin on her crossed arms and is posed on top of a dark box, which is draped in fabric. The viewer knows, by the immediacy of the makeshift materials, that this is an image taken in a studio setting and not photographic evidence of a miracle. Through artifice and props and fuzzy lighting, the photographer sets the stage for an ethereal presence in her studio. This image does not pretend to reveal the child’s true personality; is a portrait not of Rachel Gurney, but of her dressed up, and one cannot characterize the young girl’s personality. Instead of capturing the child’s character, Cameron’s image projects an adult conception of childhood innocence onto Rachel. Dressed as a beautiful angel, the photographer constructs an image of Victorian childhood that is divine and otherworldly yet confined within a frame, the walls of a photographic studio, and adult perception.

In his portraits of the Liddell sisters, Carroll appears to challenge Cameron’s imaginative construction of childhood. Instead of relying on props or costumes to signify the Liddells’ girlishness or innocence, his images engage with a 19^th-century scientific vernacular. The subjects are distanced from the viewer and exhibited in front of a plain wall. There is no fantastical narrative to accompany the portraits; the images simply present Lorina and Alice as children. By treating the girls generically and not adding any artifice or sense of mystery to the composition, Carroll offers an objective image of Victorian childhood. Both the photographs and their subjects are oriented by 19^th-century science and modernity.

Carroll’s early experimentations in photography may usefully be seen in relation to the traditions of 19^th-century scientific photography. When the medium was invented in 1839, it was considered fantastical because, for the first time, one could capture nature in its absolute form. The practice was quickly adopted by the scientific community for its ability to reveal details that evaded the human eye and produce tangible evidence of these discoveries. Corey Keller describes a 19^th-century scientific photograph as “a picture of natural phenomenon made with light-sensitive materials for the documentation, illustration, or dissemination of information to a specialized or amateur audience.”[6] For the Victorians, these scientific photographs were not only documentary, they were magical: they possessed and fixed elements of nature that were previously invisible and mobile. It is no wonder that Carroll was lured by photography’s possibilities. Through the medium’s scientific lens, he explored the intangible ideal of Victorian childhood and produced tangible evidence of this cultural construction.

Photography’s transformation of the intangible to the tangible is seen in John Adams Whipple’s daguerreotype of the moon made in the spring of 1851 (Figure 3). The image presents the evanescent surface of the moon, revealing the silvery and glowing orb. Elements of the lunar surface are exposed: seas, craters, escarpments, and highlands. Demonstrating both the literal shape of the moon as well as its figural connotations, Whipple’s daguerreotype brought the mystical, elusive, romantic, and symbolic associations of the moon down to earth, in the form of a photograph. Caught on paper through a series of chemical processes, the moon remains still—it cannot wax, wane or create oceanic tides. The medium of photography has thus captured the intangible and appeared to “fix” it in a moment in time. Magically, through the scientific lens of photography, the daguerreotype contained the moon’s elusive spirit, its figural connotations, just as Carroll’s objective portraits of the Liddell sisters captured the purity and innocence of childhood.

Whipple’s daguerreotype was shown at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851 within the luminous halls of Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (Figure 4). Erected in Hyde Park, the building was supported by slender cast-iron columns connected a series of glass panes. Long galleries illuminated by natural light created a spacious and even sacred atmosphere in which to view the latest technologies and curiosities developed during the Industrial Revolution. The architecture of the Crystal Palace expressed the dynamism and magic of modernity: its technological implications as well as its utopian aspirations. Its grand windows illuminated the objects within, recalling the magic of the photographic process. Within the Crystal Palace’s bright halls, the objects displayed were fixed and presented in their respective galleries. Just as photography brought invisible images to light, the architecture of the Crystal Palace shed light onto the new inventions and consequently the exuberance and optimism of British modernity.

Inside the Crystal Palace, Whipple’s daguerreotype of the moon was displayed in the “Philosophical Instruments and Processes” gallery, in a gold frame with an oval mat. Within this case, the scientific image of the moon became a precious and tangible object that one could stand before and examine. The spiritual symbolism of the moon was fixed by the daguerreotype; one’s gaze could locate the mystical and the intangible. During London’s Great Exhibition, Whipple himself wrote, “Nothing could be more interesting than [the moon’s] appearance through the magnificent instrument: but to transfer it to the silver plate, to make something tangible of it, was quite a different thing.”[7] The physicality of the daguerreotype, a literal token one could hold in the palm of one’s hands, meant that the moon was not only a romantic notion but also scientifically evidentiary; never before had anyone seen a detailed photographic representation of the moon or had scientists been able to share precise copies of their findings. Photography became a visual tool for scientific discoveries, providing perfect, mechanical transcriptions of observations. Unlike previous scientific representations made by hand, it produced objective images of what was seen. Furthermore, photographic objects could be easily reproduced and disseminated throughout the world, to England, continental Europe, and America.

As an object and as an image, Whipple’s daguerreotype evoked a sense of wonderment from Victorian viewers. Carroll’s images of Lorina and Alice Liddell transfer the modern expression of wonder from the cathedral-like façade of the Crystal Palace and the sparkling surface of the moon to children’s bodies. For the photographer, it seems the invented innocence of 19^th-century childhood was the locus of wonderment—not the glass structure of the Crystal Palace or the basaltic mass of the moon. The innocence of childhood wonder positioned Carroll’s photographic compositions, for children appeared to embody the whimsicality and fantasticality of Wonderland. The act of photographing Lorina and Alice was a means of pinning down their child-like state. Carroll’s pursuit of capturing this elusive state was futile, for the exact moment of innocence is always evaded by time. The world keeps spinning, orbiting around the sun, and Alice Liddell become older—and grown larger—within the forty-five second interval it took Carroll to create a wet-collodion exposure.

Carroll’s meticulous care in archiving his photographic experiments reveals his interest in preserving tangible evidence of intangible subjects. He places the portraits of the Liddell sisters within a standardized, oval-shaped mat—the same display that had been used for Whipple’s moon. Corey Keller explains that within the Crystal Palace’s gallery, Whipple’s sensational daguerreotype was, “enshrined in the leather and velvet case typically used to frame the familiar visage of a loved one.”[8] By placing the images of the Liddell sisters in oval mats, Carroll circumnavigates 19^th-century childhood and pays homage to the intangible yet continuous nature of time, for the ovular framing of both the Liddell sisters and Whipple’s moon is mobile. The curving line directs one’s gaze around the photographic subjects, encouraging one to linger at these images that are displayed and contained so beautifully within their frame. The oval, in one continuous line, is an expression of time and motion: ongoing, eternal, uninterrupted by angles. In harmony with the themes of Whipple’s moon, the oval frames of the Liddell portraits echo the moon’s course, its orbit around the Earth is as elliptical as the Earth’s orbit around the sun: twin orbits and twin-like portraits of Lorina and Alice. The act of framing is both literal and symbolic, containing the image and making it a stable object that one can hang. It also marks an endpoint to photographer’s “aspiration of permanence.”

The compositions of Lorina and Alice, in neat oval frames, echo another popular 19^th-century invention: the carte de visite, created by A.A. E. Disdéri in 1854, three years before Lewis Carroll photographed the Liddell sisters.[9] A small portrait, measuring six by nine centimeters, the carte de visite was easily pasted on the back of a conventional, engraved calling card and could be used for letter writing or as a memento. Like Whipple’s daguerreotype and Carroll’s portraits, the carte de visite is a tangible object; as a photographic object, it created a medium for Victorians to identify members of society. One could hold onto the portrait of a loved one or collect images of famous Victorian figures, such as Queen Victoria or Charles Darwin, which were sold in shops. The carte perpetuated 19^th-century ways of seeing by employing a scientific aesthetic and producing objects for Victorians to examine and classify. As tangible objects and as photographic inventions, the carte de visite created visual evidence that circulated society just as photographs of scientific phenomena were circulated and became evidentiary of discoveries.

Most of the cartes de visite of Charles Darwin that were taken after the 1859 publication of his seminal book On the Origin of Species treat the scientist as though he himself were a scientific specimen. One such image was produced by the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company in 1866 (Figure 5). Here, Darwin’s body is depicted in three-quarter-length view, as still and sterile as an image of taxidermy. His body appears lifeless and, in its immobility, ready for examination. Only his baldhead and beard are exposed; the rest of his body is cloaked in a heavy overcoat, vest, buttoned shirt, and bow tie. The glowing orb of his head emphasizes his cerebral nature, encouraging viewers to identify Darwin as a scientist and intellectual. The portrait card uses the objective vernacular of 19^th-century scientific photography to represent Darwin’s vocation. By observing the eminent scientist in a distanced and straightforward composition—a visual code for science—the viewer recognizes Darwin’s serious personality and scientific ethos. (Unlike Alice, he does not flirt with the camera lens.) In accordance with scientific photographs of the moon and other natural phenomena, the carte de visite suggests that one can know and understand Darwin simply by looking. By possessing a carte of Darwin, Victorians’ literally held onto his radical theories because the scientist behind the philosophy became a tangible object, in the form of a carte.

Carroll’s portraits of Lorina and Alice Liddell engage with the scientific vernacular of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the identification card format of the carte de visite. Just as Darwin was depicted buttoned up in the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company carte, the heads and hands of the Liddell sisters are their only exposed body parts. Their bodies are otherwise cloaked and controlled by stiff dress fabric. Lorina, a few inches taller and two years older than Alice, sits more primly than her younger sister, and stares directly at the photographer. Alice is clearly smaller than Lorina and the chair back cuts into back of her head; she seems compelled to push her chin downwards and look up at Carroll, in order to remain still for the length of the exposure. This awkward posture creates the illusion of restlessness and the tilt of her head exaggerates her childishness and flirtatiousness in comparison to Lorina. She is not seated in the proper posture. The two portraits together exhibit the evolution of girlhood: Alice, in time, will grow to her sister’s size, and sit in proper form. The viewer sees how a child grows within the span of two years.

Through the medium of photography, Carroll controlled Alice’s size in relation to her surroundings. He manually focused the camera, picking the chosen depth of field that would complement his subject’s size. Anne Higonnet writes, “In Carroll’s portraits, typically, the photographer’s point of view places the subject in a space that belongs to them—a pictorial space able to contain an entire body, yet immediately contiguous to the viewer’s.”[10] Through photography, Carroll manipulated the Liddell sisters’ size in order to reveal an invented timeline of girlhood evolution. The transformative properties of growth, central to Carroll’s investigation into the construction of 19^th-century childhood, mirror the evolutionary concepts of Darwin and the cyclical nature of the moon. The text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland often refers to shrinking, sprouting, and metamorphisizing. His interest in science, evolution, experimentation, and childhood situate his portraits of Lorina and Alice Liddell within the context of British modernism.

[2] In order to secure the image, strict adherence to procedure was paid. For instance, the glass-plate negative was developed immediately after the exposure, and then the contact print was made in direct sunlight. With regard to daguerreotype portraiture of children, John Wood explains: “The stiff, unnatural pose is one of the most common defects found in the daguerreotype; the blurred child in another. The daguerreotypist had to rely on lighting, posing, composition, and obviously his own rapport with the sitter in order to overcome the potential problems of the exposure.” “Silence and Slow Time,” The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, 14.

[3] Alice Liddell was Carroll’s muse, inspiring his photographs and his infamous children’s story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

[4] Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire, 32.

[5] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 3. On July 4, 1862, Carroll and a friend took Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell on a boat trip. Alice begged Carroll to tell the girls a story. While paddling about, the fantastical story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was told. The Oxford don gave Alice the first version of the manuscript for Christmas in 1864; this version was entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and included an inscription that read: ‘A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child, in Memory of a Summer Day.’

[6] Corey Keller, “Sight Unseen: Picturing the Invisible,” 21.

[7] Corey Keller, “Sight Unseen,” 25.

[8] The category “Philosophical Instruments and Processes” in which photography was classified included such optical devices as eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, stereo viewers and kaleidoscopes. Corey Keller, “Sight Unseen,” 28.

[9] When Carroll composed his portraits of Lorina and Alice in 1857, the carte de visite was already popular.

[10] Anne Higonnet, Lewis Carroll, 10.

Thirteen years after Roger Fry’s exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” at the Grafton House, Virginia Woolf pronounced, “On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless…”[1] At this moment, British character seemed to abandon the scientific empiricism of Victorian perspective in an effort to represent the incoherence and complexities of 20^th-century modernity. Fry’s seminal exhibition displayed the whirling and saturated colors of French post-impressionist painters and inspired forward-thinking Edwardians, like the members of the Bloomsbury group, to employ these bright forms in their work in order to dispel the vaporous, English fog that obscured the purity of British painting up until 1910. For the artists of the Bloomsbury group—painters, theorists, writers, and poets—the shadow of 19^th-century modernism prevented 20^th-century art from evolving into an aesthetic that was modern and fresh. The “Manet and the Post-Impressionist” eliminated this shadow. Here, within the galleries of the Grafton House, viewers were led through adjacent rooms from Manet, past Gauguin and Van Gogh to Matisse. The bright palettes of these newly minted post-impressionists, their rhythmical lines and abstract forms, impressed the public for better or for worse.

The Bloomsbury group’s effort to define British modernism was not British art’s first exposure to modernity. Decades before Fry’s exhibition, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—a math lecturer at Oxford—engaged with modernity from within Britain. Although Carroll is famous for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, he also created thousands of photographic images in the late 1850s and through the 1860s. These portraits of Victorian life are linked to 19^th-century British modernity due to their medium, for photography was one of the definitive inventions of the 19^th-century.[2] Carroll’s photographs are not colorful in the same mode as the 20^th-century post-impressionists, nor do they employ the significant forms Roger Fry preached. These images do, however, respond to the realities of Victorian modern life. They are scientifically objective, phantasmagoric, and self-consciously photographic. Through his experimentations in photography, Carroll exposed his own, 19^th-century version, of British modernity.

The Industrial Revolution, science, technology, and a nostalgic longing for innocence impacted Carroll’s photographic pursuits. In response to 19^th-century progress, Carroll photographed the children of his close acquaintances, for it was within their bodies that he saw the purity, whimsy, and playfulness of Wonderland. It was also here, within the frame of a photograph, that Carroll could suspend modernity’s rapid progress and growth by capturing a moment of childhood. His creative endeavors, both photographic and textual, map an important phase in British modernism and reveal a modern aesthetic that is not continental (French post-impressionists) but primarily British in character. The photographer should not be dismissed as a peripheral figure in the history of British modernism, for his work engages with modernity, thus situating British modernism before Woolf’s said 1910.

The nonsensical landscape of Wonderland maps Carroll’s engagement with modernity. As Alice falls through the rabbit hole, shrinking and growing, swimming and walking, and crying and laughing at the absurdity of the character she meets, one can imagine these feelings of disorientation as reflecting the anxieties provoked by the rapid progress of modernity in the 19^th century. Mirroring Alice’s fall through the fantastical realms of Wonderland, this thesis contains three chapters. The first, “Before the Rabbit Hole: Early Experimentations in Photography” discusses Carroll’s first photographic attempts. Through these early images, one sees that his early endeavors were firmly oriented in scientific empiricism and notions of 19^th-century objectivity and popular culture. The second chapter, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Materiality, Artifice, and Technology” defines phantasmagoria, the shifting series of illusions as created by the imagination, and argues that Carroll employed the dreamy and amorphous concept of phantasmagoria in order to express fiction. Through a mixture of media, both photographic and textual, the photographer disorients his viewer so that the images are no longer objective and scientific, they express the confusion and oddity of modernism. Finally, after tumbling through the rabbit hole in Chapter 2, the reader lands on his or her feet in Chapter 3, “Wonderland: Illustrated and Defined.” Here, Carroll employs the work of the artist Sir John Tenniel to depict Alice’s world—after several initial attempts of drawing himself—thus invoking another person in order to create a marketable version of Wonderland that would appeal to consumers.

Carroll did not invent modernism in Britain. He did, however, participate in modernism from within Britain decades before Fry’s exhibition of French post-impressionist painters at the Grafton House. This thesis argues that British modernism was not born out of an exhibition of French painters in 1910; a modern aesthetic can be mapped earlier, with the creation of Wonderland. Through photography, literature, and illustration, Carroll situates the fantastic within the context and reality of Victorian spectacle and progress. The experimenter articulated the absurdity and strangeness of modernism through the nonsense of Wonderland and in turn, positioned 20^th-century modernism.

[2] Invented by the English man William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, the magical medium revealed, fixed, and presented viewers with accurate and detailed images from life.

Nineteenth-century British modernity is characterized by an astounding leap in scientific discoveries, new technologies, mass production and imperial expansion.[1] The invention of modern mediums—like photography, railways, electricity, steel and telegraphy—inspired new ways for British society to envision and reconfigure urban spaces and urban life. How could society live ideally and sustainably within an environment characterized by machines? Many thinkers of the 19^th century, including the visionary Ebenezer Howard, looked to nature for inspiration.[2] In his 1902 prospectus Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Howard lays the groundwork for a city composed of several concentric circle cities, each surrounded by an agricultural plot: “Town and country must be married,” Howard proclaims, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.”[3] Howard’s divine city plan never left the paper it was printed on however, a mutated vision of his city exists: Los Angeles. Sixty-nine years after Howard’s publication, Reyner Banham (another Brit) celebrates the utopian and Edenic quality of Los Angeles in his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Though these books are separated by nearly seventy years, and one writer imagines an ideal city while the other reveals an actual place, both Howard and Banham are infatuated with the tension between modern materials and utopia. This tension is shared and expressed through the transportation systems described in the Garden City and Los Angeles.

Howard's Garden City

Howard envisions an ideal railway system for the Garden City; this rail would provide the skeleton for the ultimate urban life. He writes of a particular railway, recording the exact minutes it would require inhabitants from neighboring towns to reach one another.[4] (Howard was not concerned with automobiles—they were not yet invented! Instead railways were the Garden City’s main mode of transit.)[5] Through a network of tracks, these rapid machines would connect far-reaching cities—allowing the Garden City to expand without inhabitants worried about reaching other towns. Unlike the grimy and sooty tube-system, Howard writes of a “railway system and not a railway chaos.”[6] This system would efficiently move people from one town to another, allowing the circular suburbs of the Garden City to be permeable and circulatory.

Howard’s proposed railway system—most importantly—seamlessly connected the inhabitants of neighboring towns: “thus the people of the two towns would in reality represent one community.”[7] Los Angeles operates in a similar way to Howard’s Garden City. Here, cars link neighboring towns instead of railways, creating one community: Los Angeles County. Unlike Howard’s conception of the Garden City’s railway system being a pleasant experience, Los Angeles’ freeway travel can be chaotic: traffic jams, smog and smoking cars. Yet, these disturbances are inconsequential to Los Angelenos: “It will not be easy to persuade Angelenos… to leave the convenient car at home—in spite of their complaints about traffic jams—and climb into whatever colored rolling-stock the new dream-system offers.”[8] The freedom to drive, at any whim, is the ultimate utopia of Los Angeles. Behind the wheel—the modern invention of the automobile—drivers can kinetically and visually traverse the Edenic foothills, plains and beaches. Thus, Los Angelenos can find the balance between modernity and nature themselves, along their own freeway route.[9]

Los Angeles, in its wild mixture of nature and concrete, is the realized—though slightly more sinister and smoggy—Garden City. It is not bound to the pages of Howard’s prospectus but it is an actual, vital city: composed of towns surrounded by freeway systems and Edenic foliage.[10] According to Reyner Banham, each suburb of Los Angeles is defined by its ecology: beach, foothills, plains and freeways. Modern buildings and designs interrupt the wild environment of Los Angeles, creating a city whose architecture is marked by the balance between the rustic nature of its landscape and the concrete materials of 20^th-century modernity. This tension—between nature and modern materials—echoes Howard’s historical moment. He was proposing a utopian city that would sustain communities in nature alongside machines. Los Angeles is founded on the façade of sustainability—its’ inhabitants act blissfully unaware of the mirage of plentitude.

Los Angeles

Both Howard and Banham are concerned with the architecture of cities. The two Brits reveal urban spaces that positively infuse their city’s architecture with modern inventiveness while sustaining communities—through transportation systems. The two books are mobile systems in and of themselves, each mirroring the utopian city the author describes. Howard’s plan for the Garden City of tomorrow is linear, detailed, and controlled. His text reads in a similar way: each chapter addressing particular problems that may arise when convincing his audience that the Garden City is the ultimate architecture of the future. Banham’s book is more transitory: the reader can flip to any chapter, read it, and get a sense of the mobility and expansive nature of Los Angeles. Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies as objects are textual architecture.[11] The books transport the reader to these cities and similar to the railway or freeway systems, the textual architecture of Howard and Banham’s prose become the system by which readers can visit these cities.

Bibliography and Works Cited

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles; the Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London: Swan Sonnenschein &,, 1902.

Tickner, Lisa. Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

[2] Symbolically, the natural world represented Eden: an age before machines. At this particular historical moment, many inventors and artists danced along the figurative and literal lines of modernity—including Ebenezer Howard. He was caught between modernity’s mechanic and materialistic implications as well as his own desire to return to an organic and lush environment. His city plan is a product of this particular, Victorian cultural moment. Howard’s Garden city is a controlled and limited city design surrounded by constructed agricultural belts: the architecture is fabricated by modernity yet shaped by a utopian ideal.

[3] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 18.

[4] “There is, first, an inter-municipal railway connecting all the towns of the outer ring—20 miles in circumference—so that to get from any town to its most distant neighbor requires one to cover a distance of only 10 miles, which could be accomplished in, say, 12 minutes. These trains would not stop between the towns—means of communication for this purpose being afforded by electric tramways which traverse the high-roads, of which, it will be seen, there are a number—each town being connected with every other town in the group by a direct route.” Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 130.

[5] For Banham, a live network of moving cars and colossal freeways shapes the city of Los Angeles. In fact, in the first chapter of his book, he insists he needed to learn how to drive before writing the book—in order to truly experience the city as a Los Angelino.

[6] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 131.

[7] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 130.

[8] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 65.

[9] Go anywhere now!

[10] The majority of Los Angeles’ vegetation is constructed and transplanted: requiring vast amounts of nonexistent water. Thanks to the genius of William Muholland’s irrigation system, communities throughout Los Angeles County have been able to live under the façade of Eden and utopia, with lush green yards, palm trees and paradisical plants. In 1913, “As the water surged down the aqueduct, Muholland made his most famous speech: ‘There it is, take it!’” (Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 150). The iconic vegetation of Los Angeles, its lush fruitfulness, is a mirage and not at all sustainable.

[11] The printed book is another facet of modernity: printed and reproduced by a machine. It is a modern medium.

Scientific design is linked to the stars far more directly than to the earth. Star-gazing? Admittedly. But it is essential to accentuate the real source of energy and change in contrast to the emphasis that has always been placed on keeping man ‘down to earth.’

-R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon (1938), 67

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

-Italo Calvino[1]

Los Angeles contains its rich history throughout the architecture of Union Station. Within the structure of this 1939 Mission Revival building, the transitory nature of the West is felt viscerally. It is a space where people are constantly in motion—departing and arriving. Travelers exit their train, are lead by the travertine marble hallway, into the cool and quiet waiting room, and finally outside into the warm California sun. Tall palm trees line the entrance: a salute to the dream-like and expansive potential of the American West, the big rock candy mountain and America’s last great railway station.

In 1933, Old China Town was torn down in order to make room for the proposed train terminal. John and Donald Parkinson—a father and son team—were commissioned by a team of in-house architects from three participating railroads to design Union Station, a 13 million dollar endeavor. The Parkinson’s harmoniously used several distinct architectural styles; the station is a mixture of Spanish Colonial Revival, Moorish and Art Deco influences. The synthesis of these architectural styles is not only emblematic of a 1930s mode but it is also a visual representation of the diversity of the train station’s visitors. It seems fitting that the architects would choose to combine several aesthetics in order to create a space that holistically contains a smorgasbord of people, events, and memories.

My grandmother grew up in Los Angeles and would often commute cross-country to visit her father, who was in the army. A few years ago, I sat with her in Union Station’s lofty waiting room—drinking coffee—while she reminisced about the station’s grand opening in 1939. She remembered how soldiers were constantly in commute, saying hello and goodbye to sweethearts for who knew how long. The dim interior of the waiting hall is the perfect space for moments such as these, (figure 1). The room is romantic, relatively quiet, and cool; it is a melancholic respite from the blaring Los Angeles sun and action. I use the word “melancholic” because of the nature of the events that take place within this space. To wait is difficult. The lofty architecture of this room creates a space large enough to encompass the feelings that tend to follow a trip or reunion: excitement, anticipation, wonder, and desire. Calvino heralds this sentiment when he writes: “The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the place will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theater, the bazaar.”[2] This hall is a space of transition. You walk through the dim room and outside into bright possibilities of Los Angeles.

Five windows, reaching from floor to ceiling on either side of the waiting room, provide light, (figure 2). The top half of these windows are divided by panes, four windows long by three windows wide, and are relatively opaque. Through their foggy lens, commuters can gaze at the abstracted forms of tree branches and their green leaves. These windows not only provide soft lighting for the waiting room but they also frame the garden courtyards. As a function of these windows’ opacity, forms are abstracted. The garden foliage, through the foggy windows, becomes the sublime picturesque landscape—misty, leafy, and cloudy. The waiting room windows frame the constructed California garden and remind the room’s occupants of the open space that awaits outside the train station’s doors. Similar to the British neoclassicist’s remaking of the British landscape into a lush and seemingly natural utopia—Union Station’s windows provide idyllic glimpses at a new, 20^th century Arcadia: Southern California.

The waiting room’s high ceiling is atmospheric. Somehow, the heavy materials that comprise the roof seem weightless, adding to the lofty and cool ambience of this space.  Wooden rafters support the sloped ceiling and a geometric pattern is painted on top of the exposed ceiling vents, (figure 3). This motif echoes the patterns of the travertine walkway—this path cuts through the waiting room, connecting the platforms to the front entrance—as well as the color of the terra cotta floor. The pattern is a distracting and clever aesthetic innovation, for it quietly conceals the building’s infrastructure. Instead of focusing on ugly or banal ventilation, visitor’s eyes can wander about the lively pattern.

Hanging from the ceiling are chandeliers constructed in the Art Deco style, (figure 4). At their center is a floral shape, encircled by square glass panes.[3] Each chandelier measures ten feet in diameter and weighs around 3,000 pounds.[4] Below these fantastic light fixtures is an array of oversized Art Deco armchairs, upholstered in leather: a prelude to the leather train chairs. The brown leather armchairs, complete with wooden frames, are throne-like: a function of their high backs and armrests, (figure 5). Years of sitters have made these armchairs worn, comfortable, and somewhat difficult to get out of. The upholstered armchairs vary in size. Some are only two chairs wide, while longer benches consist of six chairs back to back, (twelve sitters). The tile beneath these seats are polished red quarry tile; a typical element of the Spanish Colonial Revival style the architects emulated throughout the station’s structure, (figure 6). These clay colored tiles are interrupted by the main marble walkway—a path that connects the station’s platforms to the exit doors, (figure 7). This marble provides a smooth and direct road to the exit doors.

Leaving the waiting room, the visitor walks by the station’s restaurant and information booth, into the sun. Finally outside, the visitor can take in Union Station’s façade. The station is composed from smooth white concrete, with several floor to ceiling thermal windows, (figure 8). Outside, the same terra cotta tile used on the waiting room floor borders the thermal windows. The overall structure of Union Station is church-like. A bell tower stands to the right of the entrance doors, tall as the slender palm trees, with a clock face on all four sides. Union Station is transformed into a sacred space: a church to modern technology and transportation.

Sadly, the train station is no longer Los Angeles’ central hub of commute. Los Angeles is, after all, a city of cars and expanding free ways. Despite this change in commuter modes, Union Station continues to be an architectural gem. It forcefully asserts the romanticism that is central to any train station—as experienced in the atmospheric space of the waiting room. Union Station, like train stations throughout the world, is a place where time seems suspended for a moment, while commuters wait for their departure or arrival. Today, the building is a nostalgic environment, a reminder of an era before gridlock traffic: where sharply dressed soldiers could meet their sweethearts in the sunny courtyard, under the fantastic Los Angeles sun, and dream up the possibilities of the last frontier.

Bibliography and Works Cited

Brown, Christopher. Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt, 1974.

[2] Ibid., 34.

[3] These panes are textured and thus shed dim yet comfortable light throughout the waiting room. Perhaps the low light emitted from the chandeliers resonates with the new Arcadia effect produced by the enormous windows. Their dimness constructs the perfect theater for mystery and sublime…

[4] Christopher Brown, Still Standing: A Century of Urban Train Station Design. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 124.

Figure 1. Waiting room, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 2. Waiting room windows, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 3. Waiting room ceiling, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 4. Waiting room chandelier, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 5. Seating in the waiting room, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 6. Tile floor in the waiting room, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 7. Waiting room and travertine walkway, Union Station, Los Angeles.

Figure 8. Union Station, Los Angeles.

I know that I am not a category, a hybrid specialization, I am not a thing- a noun. I seem to be a verb- an evolutionary process, an integral fuction of the universe, and so are you.

-R. Buckminster Fuller