Carroll, Lewis. Lewis Carroll, Photographer, by Helmut Gernsheim.

Revised Edition. Dover, 1969. [First issued in 1949, this edition with a 1969 Preface by the author and incorporating the Addenda in the Second Edition published in 1950. Also two photographs have been substituted for ones in the earlier editions, as explained in the Preface.] Stiff wraps, early printing with $2.50 price printed at top right of front cover; price not present there on later printings. Near very good with plastic starting to delaminate at bottom right corner of cover and 22 May 1972 gift inscription on title page. Summary:

irst published in 1949 and released in a revised Dover paperback edition in 1969, Lewis Carroll, Photographer by eminent photographic historian Helmut Gernsheim is a landmark study that established Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) as one of the most significant amateur portraitists of the Victorian era. The book features Gernsheim's detailed critical essay alongside sixty-four black-and-white photogravure plates reproducing Carroll's portraits of children, family, prominent contemporaries—such as John Everett Millais, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—and self-portraits. Drawing extensively from Carroll's personal diaries and surviving ledgers, Gernsheim documents the literary icon's intense twenty-four-year engagement with the wet-collodion process, shedding light on his aesthetic sensibilities, studio methods, and acute eye for composition.

Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), was an English author, mathematician, Anglican deacon, and pioneer of 19th-century amateur photography. Dodgson took up photography in 1856 under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge and colleague Reginald Southey, quickly mastering the laborious wet-collodion process and establishing a private studio at Christ Church, Oxford. Over a twenty-four-year period ending in 1880, he created nearly 3,000 images, focusing primarily on formal portraits of notable Victorian intellectuals, artists, personal acquaintances, and young children—most famously Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll approached photography with meticulous artistic intent, favoring natural postures, thoughtful expression, and precise staging over static studio conventions, which earned him recognition as one of the finest portraitists of the early photographic medium before he abruptly ceased practicing in 1880.