A personable young Victorian gentleman in frock-coat standswith his arm draped matily (perhaps even a touch amorously) around theshoulder of a skeleton. Allowing for the greater bulk of clothes, tissueand blood in the one on the left, they're almost the same size, and they'reboth facing to the right in much the same posture, so that you have thecomic- creepy impression that the fellow is literally showing off his ownbones, as if he were a cutaway diagram in an anatomy textbook. On the tablein front of this odd couple are a brace of skulls and the complete skeletonof a smaller primate, some monkey or chimp, with huge goofy eye sockets.Curioser and curioser...

This photograph, Reginald Southey with Skeleton and Skulls,comes as an agreeable surprise in the context of A Collector's Choice,the new exhibition at Bradford's National Museum of Photography; it's aboutthe only image in the show that seems to have been conceived in a spiritof fun, however idiosyncratic. The man who contrived this bizarre set-up was one CL Dodgson of Christ Church, Oxford, better known in literatenurseries as Lewis Carroll, and more usually associated with solemn studiesof little girls.

But here, in 1857 (eight years before the publicationof the first Alice book) is Carroll the photographic wag, making what nowlooks like a visual quip, two years before the publication of The Originof Species, about men and apes being cousins beneath the skin. Perhapsthat touch of controversialist's wit was accidental, and Carroll's conceithas grown more sardonic with the passage of time; in any case, the pictureis about as jaunty as a memento mori can be.

Where Carroll was using his camera to demonstrate thematerial scaffolding of the human face, quite a few of his contemporarieswere obviously in search of its spiritual underpinning - what an age ofbelief would have felt comfortable in calling the soul. A journalist writingfor The Graphic in 1873 said of Julia Margaret Cameron's work that "Thosewho have seen some of Mrs Cameron's portraits, and have also seen the personsportrayed, cannot but think that there is a power in Photography to revealsome mysteries of the being, which flesh and blood cannot reveal."

Hats off to that uncredited writer. Nowadays, it's almostbanal to point out that photography offered the world not simply a newtechnology of depiction but a fresh way of seeing. What the chap from TheGraphic had cottoned on to so quickly was that the same camera which, proverbially,did not lie, could also and more importantly tell unprecedented kinds oftruth, and that you could learn something new about a person from a mechanicalrecord of the contact of light with flesh.

Walking around this beguiling set of core samples fromthe first 30 years of British portrait photography, it's easy to detectthe earnestness with which those truths could be pursued. Michael G Wilson,a leading collector of 19th -century photographs, has culled his show fromthe NMPFT's archive of more than a million prints, and he's opted for asolid, classically- inclined anthology - generous representations of thebig names, with a sprinkling of works by lesser-known figures and off-beatstudies from the famous.

The show begins with cases of daguerreotypes and a sizeablechunk of work by William Henry Fox Talbot, the British inventor of thecalotype (faster exposure time, hence a better medium for portraits ofanyone who wasn't either asleep, dead or preternaturally lazy), and itconcludes with almost 30 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, some extremelyfamiliar and none the less welcome for that, others - including a sequencefrom her years in Sri Lanka - less so.

Between these chronological brackets are works by thestandard reference- book pioneers: the Edinburgh team of David OctaviusHill and Robert Adamson, compared in their brief heyday to Rembrandt, butgiven to a stagey solemnity (harps, robes, heavenward gazes) that onlythe pure of heart will not find a bit silly; Roger Fenton's heavily editedcoverage of the Crimean War; and Lewis Carroll, who was notably sniffyabout "Mrs Cameron's large heads taken out of focus", preferring piecesby Lady Hawarden - a verdict that now seems as perverse as, say, SamuelButler's promoting Handel to a rank well above Beethoven, or GB Shaw'sassertion of the massive inferiority of Shakespeare to GB Shaw.

Clementina, Lady Hawarden is represented by a quartetof exposures showing young ladies next to a sun-flooded window, young ladiesat the dressing table, a young lady reading a book and a young lady, IsabellaGrace Maud (the photographer's daughter), posing stiffly in front of afull-length mirror. Feminists have struggled womanfully to see Lady H'swork as expressive of "a sense of entrapment within Victorian expectations,"but it would be rash to rule out the possibility that she just thoughther girls looked pretty in their nice frocks.

Grittier matter is provided by the likes of John Thompson,with his studies of street life in London (1877) - one of which, entitledThe Crawlers, showing an old woman scrunched up in a doorway, was treatedto a full- page enlargement in last Saturday's Independent magazine, andwas a lot easier to read there than the tiny original; and by Oscar G Rejlander'sA Night on the Streets of London, which depicts a sleeping waif who, tocynical modern eyes, shows suspiciously clean -looking legs and shouldersthrough artful rents in his garments.

The exhibition achieves a memorable final act with itscelebration of Julia Margaret Cameron, whose soft-focus work may have lookedsloppy to Carroll but now seems like one of the least disputable gloriesof its age. Even for those less than entranced by her penchant for dressing-up, allegorising, theatricalising or what have you, some of the plainerportraits - including the well-known ones of her niece Julia Jackson, of"Iago", of Tennyson (two versions here) and of Carlyle - are triumphs ofthe youthful art.

We know from Cameron's writings that she was intent oncatching the spiritual essence of her sitters, and these fruits of herperfected technique are powerful enough to make you feel a hint of thesupernatural. If I could shop -lift just one image from A Collector's Choiceit would probably be Cameron's portrait of Thomas Carlyle - a hauntingencounter with a haunted mind, a two-dimensional Michaelangelo carved withsunlight, far more sombre than the Rev Dodgson's breezy brush with mortalityand far more beautiful into the bargain.