Description
In 2020-21 I curated an exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, called Technicolour Dickens: The Living Image of Charles Dickens. The aim of the exhibition was to explore the writer's image, starting in his lifetime, by tracing both his physical appearance, and his status as a colourful celebrity, through artist interpretations, radical rethinking in popular culture and new digital technologies and re-imaginings.The face of Dickens was and is well known; this familiarity was greatly assisted by wide public distribution of the photographic images that circulated in his lifetime, captured in England, France, and the United States by some of the best-known photographic practitioners of the time. From the start of this writer's career, as people sought to devour his words, they also wished to possess a "piece" of Dickens, through collecting photographs, using his name to advertise products, and creating admiring fan portraits of the writer at home. This lecture will concentrate on the research considerations and techniques used to bring Dickens to life through the colourisation of eight photographic portraits (reproduced below), which formed the centrepieces of the "Technicolour Dickens" exhibition. In the process, details will be revealed about how we imagined and settled on the author's skin colour, the patterns and textures of the fabrics he wore, the jewellery he displayed,and details of the objects with which he was pictured; in this way, it will be possible to illustrate how such re-imagining can assist us in bridging the historical and imaginative gaps between the seemingly monochromatic figures of the past, and the rich, vividly polychromatic worlds in which they lived and breathed.
| Period | 29 Aug 2022 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Dickens, Charles
- Photography