The impact of imagery from Mephistopheles to Freud was traced by writer and historian Marina Warner at the Glucksman Gallery last weekend, when she spoke on the magic illusions of art in her contribution to the "Through the Looking Glass" exhibition at the gallery.

By any standards a dazzling exposition of Faust's own desire to "stay the moment" as it is worked through, consciously and otherwise, by writers and photographers, Warner's theme linked Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse with the work of her maternal relative, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. From there to uses of the mobile phone may seem rather a big step, but Warner made it creatively credible. Photography, she said, is a way of taking the pulse of the passage of time in order to stay the moment.

The Victorian fascination with childhood and dream-states, mesmerism and trances influenced, or was influenced by, the work of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Cameron herself, Clementine Lady Haywarden, and writers fascinated by the new metaphysics of the psyche and the uses of reflective images in allegorical compositions. To go through the looking glass was a way of exploring a transient life, in which children, presented often as angels and messengers, provided the "go-between" to sub-conscious or imagined worlds.