Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron. Portraits to Dream In

Two such different women, distant in time and space. Two great photographers that the National Portrait Gallery has decided to compare in an unprecedented exhibition that will take place in the London museum starting in March 2024. The protagonists of this game of mirrors are Julia Margaret Cameron, a British photographer born in 1815 and considered one of the most important portrait painters of the 19th century. On the other hand, as a counterpart, Francesca Stern Woodman the enfant prodige born in the United States in 1958 and passed away at the age of 23, one of the greatest talents of twentieth-century portraiture. To keep these two very different profiles together in an exhibition that stages over 150 rare vintage prints, a single keyword: dream. A mystical appearance contained by common formal canons, that blur sought in Cameron's soft close-ups, that vagueness of contours sought in movements and in that overexposure desired by Woodman. Two styles that seem to reunite indefinitely and that otherwise go beyond appearances to use creativity and imagination to suggest beauty, to evoke symbols and mysteries, to tell stories and imagine worlds.