Alice Would Have Loved a Digital Camera in Wonderland

Charles Dodgson

The author of Alice in Wonderland, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, 1832 – 1898), was a photography buff. This was at a time when photography was a rather complicated, intricate and cumbersome business.

Film did not exist in the 1850s and Charles – who was a math teacher at Oxford – had to pour a gummy solution of collodion onto a glass plate inside a darkroom. This primitive version of the image sensor had to be carefully prepared and then carried to the camera for a shot and then back again to the darkroom for development. He did this for every single shot that he made.

Charles took photographs of people, especially portraits of children, among them the child Alice Liddel. The stories he told these kids were later published as Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Did he take landscape photographs of Victorian England? Not much. Doing that would entail a large entourage of carriers, including a horse, to transport all the equipment and materials needed every time for a single shot.

[Via: BooksPlease]

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.