Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden | 
 enlarge | Author: Carol Mavor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 621815
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 213
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0822323893
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.92
EAN: 9780822323891
ASIN: 0822323893
Publication Date: December 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New - may have a small remainder mark on the edge.
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Product Description
Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1822–1865) produced over eight hundred photographs during her all-too-brief life. Most of these were portraits of her adolescent daughters. By whisking away the furniture and bric-a-brac common in scenes of upper-class homes of the Victorian period, Lady Hawarden transformed the sitting room of her London residence into a photographic studio?a private space for taking surprising photos of her daughters in fancy dress. In Carol Mavor’s hands, these pictures become windows into Victorian culture, eroticism, mother-daughter relationships, and intimacy.
With drama, wit, and verve, Lady Hawarden’s girls, becoming women, entwine each other, their mirrored reflections and select feminine objects (an Indian traveling cabinet, a Gothic-style desk, a shell-covered box) as homoerotic partners. The resulting mise-en-scène is secretive, private, delicious, and arguably queer?a girltopia ripe with maternality and adolescent flirtation, as touching as it is erotic. Luxuriating in the photographs’ interpretive possibilities, Mavor makes illuminating connections between Hawarden and other artists and writers, including Vermeer, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and twentieth-century photographers Sally Mann and Francesca Woodman. Weaving psychoanalytic theory and other photographic analyses into her work, Mavor contemplates the experience of the photograph and considers the relationship of Hawarden’s works to the concept of the female fetish, to voyeurism, mirrors and lenses, and twins and doubling. Under the spell of Roland Barthes, Mavor’s voice unveils the peculiarities of the erotic in Lady Hawarden’s images through a writerly approach that remembers and rewrites adolescence as sustained desire.
In turn autobiographical, theoretical, historical, and analytical, Mavor’s study caresses these mysteriously ripped and scissored images into fables of sapphic love and the real magic of photography.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A mother's Vision of her girls March 25, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Carol Mavor takes interesting and provocative photographs from Queen Victoria's era, and turns them into an intellectual tour de force. She dissects Hawarden's motivations and her work comparing it to her modern peer, Sally Mann. As an ardent and avid photographer of interesting women I think that Carol Mavor looks beyond the two dimensions of a photograph to see the soul of the subject...Hawarden was clearly not a woman of her time and class, but an artist beyond time. I am fascinated how well smart women can see beyond the superficial to the suprising, how emotion and sensuality is exposed through Victorian garments, or Virginia countryside naturalism. This book made me want to meet Carol Mavor, and you, the reader will be facinated by what she has to say as much as the photos say for themselves.
 Amazing book! August 2, 2000
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
After reading Mavor's previous book, I sat transfixed for something like three days---her wonderful, insightful, and truly beautiful prose always leaves me breathless. This new book is just as good as the last. She leaves you with completely fresh ways of thinking about adolescence, beauty, motherhood, photography, the Victorians and ourselves. She is objective, yet highly intimate and personal at the same time and the result is the most complex and yet accessible academic writing I have ever encountered. Her work and particularly this book have informed my thinking about my own life and my work in ways that no other has before.
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