Assignment:
This was a tough one. The idea came relatively quickly, but the execution of it was arduous.
Through the looking glass of course, was a story written by a reluctant Anglican Deacon called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Charles was a lifelong professor of mathematics at Christ Church. Why is he called a reluctant deacon? Well the standard requirement of professors at the time was to be ordained as deacons in the Church of England. Charles apparently had petitioned for an exemption but was denied, and subsequently submitted to ordination.
Yeah, I hear you yelling at the screen: “Lewis Carroll wrote that story”! Indeed, but there is a story there as well. Lewis Carroll is actually a play on his real name. Wikipedia notes that: “Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which comes the name Charles.” So Charles Lutwidge in Latin becomes Carolus Ludovicus, translate that back into English and we get Carroll Lewis. Of course being the star mathematician he was, he reversed the words and we have his pen name. (He loved word play, and he actually created a word game that today one would recognize as similar to Scrabble).
Ok but we are supposed to be talking about this looking glass thing. Yes indeed, so Lewis had reached fame with his “Alice in Wonderland” novel, and “Looking Glass” was a sequel to that story. This time instead of falling into a rabbit hole, Alice finds she can step through a mirror, and finds a reversed, fantastical world of opposites. It is interesting that the first novel used the imagery of playing cards, and “Looking Glass” uses the imagery of chess as the motif. In fact, Alice’s journey through this land can be traced to actual movement of chess pieces on a board. In fact a clever student, Glen Downey was able to convince an academic department to allow him to write a masters thesis about it! (Many thanks to Wikipedia for all of the above data)!
So how to take a picture. Yes indeed. My first thought, since the instructions was to take a picture through glass or plastic, was to use a pane of glass light it so there would be a ghost image. Then I thought about the story being linked to chess, and thought of a checkerboard being a platform for the image. And also since Alice becomes a queen in the end, to show her in the last rank on the board being promoted as a queen. Well I didn’t quite get it to all fit together but take a look and see if you can figure out everything. This is not a double exposure, it was done in one shot, but Jazzy is actually a print used in the background, I didn’t think I could get her to stand there and wait for me to get the lighting correct.
