Through the Cheval GlassReproduction in the
Photographs of Clementina Hawarden
By Stassa Edwards
Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye
caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines
the role that reproduction — photographic, biological — plays in this oeuvre, and searches for
the only person not captured clearly: Hawarden herself.
PUBLISHED
January 24, 2024
Photograph by Clementina Hawarden of her daughter, also named Clementina,
taken in her home studio at 5 Princes Gardens in South Kensington, London, ca.
1862–63. The Victoria & Albert Museum’s description of this photograph
conjectures that “possibly there is a slight suggestion of a hand in the act of
removing and/or replacing the lens cap to begin and end the exposure” — Source.
Does Lady Clementina Hawarden’s hand hover, disembodied, next to her camera in this
photograph? It seems to exist in an indeterminate state. At once present and absent, her hand is,
as the Victoria & Albert’s labeling indicates, a “slight suggestion”, a blurred historical
reproduction or a trick of the present-day viewer’s eyes, as they produce the history we want to
see.
This ghostly outline appears in one of the many photographs Hawarden took of her daughter
Clementina, who wears a typically fussy Victorian dress, her right forearm leaning against a
large mirror, fingers grazing her temple. Clementina’s contemplative pose frames the full-length
mirror, demanding that the viewer’s gaze linger on both the reflective object and what is or is not
captured in it. It is an unusual image: though roughly 775 of her photographs survive, this
ghostly remnant is one of only two possible photographic traces left of the viscountess.
Detail of the camera reflected in a mirror from Clementina Hawarden’s photograph
of her daughter Clementina, ca. 1862–63. The “suggestion of a hand” is
supposedly visible here on the left side of the camera, wrapping the lens
— Source.
In this accidental (or apocryphal) self-portrait, taken between 1859 and 1861, one can see a
confluence of various forms of reproduction: that of biology, in the subject of her daughter, and
that of the visual, in the technology of photography and the reflecting mirror. Hawarden is the
source of this reproduction — creator of both the photograph and her daughter; her “authorship”
is underscored by the placement of her camera in the mirror, and made uncanny by her spectral
presence, real or imagined. The full-length mirror appeared regularly in Hawarden’s
photographs, emerging as one of her favorite props in the makeshift studio she created in her
South Kensington, London home located at 5 Princes Gardens.1 Within the frame of the
photograph, the labor of motherhood and the labor of photography are compositionally bound by
mirror-adjacent effects: doubling and reproduction, a rare coupling by one of early
photography’s rare woman practitioners.