A Photographer's Day Out

Photos, texts and vignette on front page: Lewis Carroll

Spanish translation and introductory text: © Santiago R. Santerbás. Ediciones Hiperión, S. L. 1983

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  It is a pity that the fabulist Lewis Carroll wasn´t greatly interested in the deeds of the photographer Dogson: all his writings on photography can be counted with the fingers of one hand. The first of them, a satirical work titled Photography Extraordinary, appeared in Misch-Masch (1885), one of those magazines of domestic confection and diffusion he liked so much. The second one is a parody of The Song of Hiawatha, the famous poem of Longfellow («the greatest living master of language», according to Carroll); it was titled Hiawatha's Photographing and was published in the december 1857 edition of The Train. The third, The Lady's History, was part of a fanciful Legend of Scotland, allegedly written in 1325 and posthumously edited by Stuart Dogson Collingwood, nephew and the first biographer of the author, in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book (1899).

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  The fourth and last, is the one presented to the reader here under the title A Photographer's Day Out.
  
  Probably the most hilarious, simple and explicit of the narrative works of Lewis Carroll, was released in The South Shields Amateur Magazine of January 1860. There are no ambiguities nor semantic distortions, and it would be pretentious to look for signs of some romantic frustration of the author in the laughable misfortunes of the main character. By then, reverend Charles Lutwidge Dogson had not yet started to photograph girls «dress of nothing», nor had Lewis Carroll gone through that blurred mirror that leads to impossible universes. Both were just a 27 year old young man who had a photographic camera and knew how to laugh at it and at himself.