On Microphotography: Aunt Lucy at the Microscope

On Microphotography:Aunt Lucy at the Microscope Jennifer Green-Lewis (bio) All photographs, if they are "about" anything, are at least partly about looking; indeed, looking—performed by the spectator but sometimes also by the subject of the photograph—may itself be the primary interest. This 1858 picture of Lucy Lutwidge at the microscope seems to me to be a good example of such a photograph (fig. 1). Aunt Lucy—who moved into the Dodgson household in 1851 after the death of her sister to care for the eleven Dodgson children and lived there until she died in 1880—appears now mostly in scholarly footnotes and a handful of family letters, but she was also an apparently cheerful participant in a number of photographs. In this one, she is looking, or pretending to look, through a microscope that most likely belongs to the photographer, her nephew Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, later known as Lewis Carroll. If the photograph is correctly dated, Dodgson was soon to replace this particular microscope with a top-of-theline Smith and Beck model. Domestic microscopes for parlour use were popular at mid-century; Aunt Lucy shows herself to be au courant in her scientific pursuit, if not entirely at ease. Is that a self-conscious giggle as she obligingly peers through the lens? And what, if anything, is she looking at? We know from his diary that Dodgson had a "collection of micro-photographs," and perhaps he selected something from that to amuse his aunt (14). What he actually meant by "micro-photographs" is, however, unclear. Thomas Sutton's Dictionary of Photography (1858) records that the term references two different processes. One is of little or no practical utility and consists in copying objects on an exceedingly small scale, the photograph being intended to be viewed through [End Page 12] a magnifier, or microscope. The other, which is a branch of photography of the highest interest and importance, consists in producing enlarged photographs of minute objects, that is, in fixing the images obtained in the microscope. (Sutton 295) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Charles Dogson, Lucy Lutwidge with Microscope, c. 1858, albumen print. Reproduced by permission from the National Science & Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. Sutton, a photographer and the founding editor of the journal Photographic Notes (1856–67), distinguishes helpfully between the two processes, but he also likely confused some readers by asserting that the term "micro-photographs" accurately described both. The second process, involving the enlargement of "images obtained in the microscope," was more precisely referred to as photomicrography, or, as was also used in Victorian periodicals, photo-microscopy or microscopic photography. Albeit inadvertently, Sutton provides a useful reminder of the instability of photographic terms in the mid-nineteenth century; it is a heads-up that any Victorian reference to "micro-photography"—with or without the hyphen, which Dodgson used in his diary but which eventually disappeared—doesn't necessarily involve microphotographs at all. We can't know for sure whether Dodgson showed his aunt slides of beetle eyes or [End Page 13] spider legs or maybe the tongue of a fly—any of which would have been a photomicrographic exercise in shrinking the perceiver, relative to the natural world—or whether he was indulging his interest in scale in a different way with microphotographs, which have the reverse effect of enlarging the viewer relative to the object viewed. What we do know is that on the evening of 4 July 1862, after a day on the river during the course of which he told Alice and her sisters the first version of Alice's adventures underground, Dodgson took the girls to his rooms to see his "collection of micro-photographs" (Carroll 95). Whether peeping at them through the microscope or some other magnifying device, the girls encountered the same process of miniaturization and expansion that the fictional Alice experiences, an echo surely lost neither on the girls themselves, who had spent a good part of their day imagining that very thing, nor on Dodgson, who was drawn to photography as the site of play and whose own photographs were in some ways secondary to the creative, social...

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