Transaction suite

Lady Clementina Hawarden’s vast body of images (775 photographs, about 90% of her work, held by the V & A) predominantly document a narrative of her three eldest daughters’ transition through adolescence into adulthood. For Sayers and Lundgreen they provide a vehicle to signify rites of passage with perhaps greater emphasis on gender identification and ‘coming of age’. Their latent sexuality may be seen as an expression of such a journey into self-awareness.

Issues of power, mirroring, doubling, sameness and difference resonate with aspects of Close Encounters, the Caravaggio/Saraceni piece. Despite the period costumes, their lack of formality with bare rooms and minimal props make them seem both accessible and contemporary.

‘Her awareness that fancy and fact coexist in a photograph, and that this coexistence is at the very heart of the photographic enterprise, may explain why her otherwise old-fashioned work seems comfortably at home in the present. . . ‘
Andy Grundberg, reviewing Hawarden’s work  in The New York Times (July 27, 1990)