Тогда объясните мне, пожалуйста, каким образом и могли производиться эти съемки?

- Не позволите ли вы сфотографировать вашу дочь раздетой, без панталончиков, подвязок и чулочков, с целью изучения человеческой анатомии и подтверждения теории Дарвина?

- Да-да, конечно, мистер Доджсон! Молли, разденьте, Алису и приведите ее в гостиную!

But was Carroll a pedophile? As you walk through ''Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition,'' organized by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin to mark his death in 1898 and now at the Equitable Gallery in Manhattan, the question seems oddly irrelevant. What is most startling, and attractive, in his portraits of girls is not what he saw in them but what they saw in him.

''Lewis Carroll . . . came to our country home to photograph the children,'' wrote Dymphna Ellis, one of the children Carroll photographed. She added: ''I feel sure I was a 'favorite.' He made every child that. He developed the photographs in our cellar . . . I remember the mess and the mystery . . . We cried when he went away . . . We were absolutely fearless with him. We felt he was one of us, and on our side against all the grown-ups.''

These don't sound like the words of a victim of childhood seduction. But something in them is still alarming: cellar, mess, mystery, fearless. The words make you think that whatever Carroll and his little subjects were up to, it was exciting and seductive for all concerned. They were co-conspirators.

The photographs are the evidence. From the looks of them, these little girls weren't worried about the Big Bad Wolf. Even Carroll's photograph of Agnes Grace Weld posing as Little Red Riding Hood doesn't suggest that. She is intense, penetrating and focused as she emerges from the woods with a basket of goodies.

The exhibition vigorously inoculates the viewer against the idea that Carroll was a pedophile. It devotes more space to Carroll's pictures of family, friends and colleagues than to those he called his child friends. It shows none of his nude pictures of girls and only one photograph of Alice Liddell, Carroll's favorite girl and the saucy inspiration for ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'' It includes testimonials from the women Carroll photographed as children: they adored him.

What emerges instead is something even more unsettling. The children in the photographs, in striking contrast to the grown-ups, are bold, sultry, mischievous and seductive. They seem as eager to please him as he was to please them. They appealed to him, in both senses of the word.

What electrified them so? There is a hint in Carroll's letters to them. The exhibition includes a letter he wrote to Rosamond Langbridge upbraiding Rosamond's big sister Gladys for being ''wanting in businesslike habits.'' (He had asked Gladys if the three sisters would like to divide a gift of six different books among themselves, and she had neglected to specify a desired distribution.) Carroll's letter, playfully alluding to a certain grasping disposition in Gladys and referring Rosamond to ''Blackstone's Treatise on the Just Claims of Younger Sisters,'' gently teases Rosamond into his world with a brew of logic, scolding, meddling and silliness.

Krafft-Ebing invented the concept and term paedophile in the 1880s <...skip...> Before Krafft-Ebing, Victorians seemed able innocently to love children who were not their own, even to idolise them for imaginary angelic purity. Dodgson avowedly loved a succession of little girls he called his `child friends'. Parents permitted him - indeed, often commissioned him - to photograph their daughters, sometimes nude. Since Krafft-Ebing and Freud, Dodgson has been retrospectively suspected of a perverse obsession with prepubescents.

D.:- Lady Liddell, would you mind if we make several pictures of your daughter in...mmm... italian style, a la renaissance? We both are indeed rather keen about it. You know, she is my best model, I wouldn't manage it with anyone else.
A:- Oh, Maman, please do let us, please!
D:- Of course, we both heartily invite to help us with your advice in the studio. You've got such a wonderful eye for portraits. It won't go without you.
M:- Well, I don't know, I have to ask my husband.
D:- I talked to Jim in the college, he's all for it.

хорошая штука - восприятие. и так и сяк можно повернуть одно и то же. обнаженная натура - даже в викторианскую эпоху воспринималась как "искусство" и не было связано с "полом" - все эти амуры и психеи... я не буду на эту тему, лучше такой пример приведу. видел я на днях девочку в зоопарке, лет 11, наверное, не больше. Хорошо сформированный костяк, красивые, практически женские ноги, довольно сложившаяся, грациозная такая фигура... в общем, почему я внимание обратил - одета она была в розовые шортики с кружевной отделкой, открывавшие значительную часть попы и весьма открытый топ. выглядело это не просто вульгарно, а слегка шокирующе, особенно на фоне вполне обычной мамашы. и тут до меня дошло. это ж, блин, не женщина. а девчонка маленькая. сюси-пуси, все дела. Барби. Розовые шортики. Кукла. Мамаша, покупающая своей девочке одежду, просто не видит в ней без пяти минут женщину, или хочет чтобы дочь выглядела как можно моложе, чтобы самой быть моложе тоже. вот так и эти викторианские дамы. А! Профессор! Хотите порисовать Алису? Хоть на что-то сгодится эта дрянная девчонка! :)