Ephemeral Stillness

I love the quietness in these photographs, a frozen moment of the interplay of light, time and space.

Girl at a Window, by Lady Clementina Hawarden, early 1860's.

This light-suffused study is more Impressionist in feeling than Pre-Raphaelite. Yet the combination of simple pose and an overt appeal to the imagination is also characteristic of the more intimate aspects of Pre-Raphaelism: Rossetti's drawings of Elizabeth Siddal are an obvious example. (source)

Clementina Maude, arms raised, 5 Princes Gardens; 
by Lady Clementina Hawarden.

Clementina Maude, 5 Princes Gardens, by Lady Clementina Hawarden.

Isabella Grace, 5 Princes Gardens, South Kensington (1864), by Lady Clementina Hawarden.

Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, Paris (1911), by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Untitled (detail), by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Untitled, by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Dolores, by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Le comte Etienne de Beaumont, by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

Julia Stephen at the Bear, Grindelwald, Switzerland, 1889.

This was Vanessa Bell’s favorite photograph of her mother. It was taken by Leslie Stephen’s friend Gabriel Loppé, the French painter of the high Alps. The subject is very reminiscent of the final scene in Virginia Woolf’s essay, 'On Being Ill' (1930). The essay ends with a description of the third Marchioness of Waterford gazing out the window on the day of her husband’s funeral. “She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs on the day of the burial, the beauty of the great lady standing to see the hearse depart, nor when he came back, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.” [From Leslie Stephen's photograph album and epistolary memoir Mausoleum Book, source here.]

Vaslav Nijinsky in the ballet "L'après-midi d'un faune," photographed by Baron Adolf de Meyer.

The Kiss of Peace, by Julia Margaret Cameron (c.1869)

"A picture instinct with delicate observation, sweetness and refinement. One of the noblest works ever produced by photography."

～P. H. Emerson

Beatrice, 19th October 1870, by Julia Margaret Cameron 
(after Shelley's verse drama The Cenci).

*Today's music: Szymon Brzóska, discovered through Sutra, a collaboration between the composer and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.