Lewis Carroll's Photographs Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words - 1

Lewis Carroll's Photographs - Research Paper Example For most artists and writers in this era, the child was nothing more than a shadow of the adult. This ultimately meant that rather than being portrayed as they were, they were instead portrayed as adults wanted them to be portrayed.Carroll embraced this theme of the child as a shadow of humanity in his photographs in order to draw attention to how misconceived children were by adults, particularly using the real children that he met in his life. Lewis Carroll sought to show children as adult shadows, the children’s identity as being shadowed by the adults, as well as the shadows that the children cast. Therefore, this paper will seek to show how Lewis Carroll used children in his photographs to show their innocence and the misconceptions that adults oftentimes had about them. Lewis Carroll exemplified how misconceived children were by undressing them or dressing them through a creation of what he perceived to be his own shadow of being a child. Recognized as a leading amateur and child photographer during the Victorian era, Carroll used the photographs he took to displace reality. Because photography in this period was a relatively new phenomenon, Lewis Carroll took it as a means of writing by using light with his most preferred photographic subject being the child as shown in the photographs above. This was obviously something of a new and dynamic approach. At least sixty percent of all his known photographs were of children. At the time, photography was taken as the only art form that could accurately record true reality. Carrol then took this representation of â€Å"reality† and created a reverse text for the discussion of children. This reverse text helped to falsify how real a photograph could be. In various photographs, rather than giving the audience his own view of who a child should be, Carroll came up with the composition an adult would have a child.