S AN FRANCISCO — THE man who wrote "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" was an equally brilliant photographer. But in modern times Lewis Carroll's achievements have been overshadowed by the widely held conviction that his primary inspiration, literary and artistic, was an unsavory obsession with little girls.

Even as scholarly revisionists have begun questioning this presumed linchpin of the Carroll psychobiography, a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is challenging viewers to take a fresh look at his photographs. "Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll" argues that if we set aside modernist aesthetics and tabloid Freudianism and view these pictures in their Victorian context, they reveal themselves to be serious artistic works less concerned with the beauty of children than with theatrics, allegory and artifice.

In other words, Carroll's pictures reflect not pedophilia but a kind of pre-modern postmodernism.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson bought his first camera in 1856, the same year he began publishing poetry and stories under the pen name Lewis Carroll. He was 24 and a newly appointed lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and he soon became an accomplished photographer as well. Over the next quarter century he mastered the messy and cumbersome technology and produced thousands of images.

Seventy-six of them — some familiar, some never exhibited before — make up the San Francisco show, which will travel next year to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

"This is the first effort in 50 years to evaluate the pictures in art-historical terms," said Douglas R. Nickel, curator of photography at the San Francisco museum and the organizer of the exhibition. "There's been very little about Dodgson the photographer that isn't clouded by his literary reputation. If this show can just get people to look past their preconceptions and actually see the pictures, I'll think it has done its job."

Mr. Nickel's show is opening just a few months after another major effort to reassess Dodgson's photographs was published by Princeton University Press. "Lewis Carroll, Photographer" presents for the first time all 407 of the Dodgson photos in the university's collection and a chronology of all the pictures he is known to have taken.

The British photographic historian Roger Taylor, a co-author of the Princeton volume, agrees with Mr. Nickel that Dodgson the visual artist is due for re-evaluation. "His photography is much more extraordinary than we realized," Mr. Taylor said. "His ability to establish rapport with the sitter, the way he held their attention, his composition — there is no other photographer working in that way with that consistency in the whole history of photography."

Dodgson's photographs are often cited as proof of his girl fixation, and in that respect Mr. Nickel's choice of photographs won't surprise traditionalists. While there are several pictures of little boys, families and adult women, and one oddly modern study of a bird skeleton, most of the images are of young girls.

These are not nymphets, however, but real, often rather plain children. And as Mr. Nickel points out in the show's gracefully written catalog, most of Dodgson's subjects, adult and child, are not just sitting for a portrait, but playing a role.

Theatricals and charades were a staple of upper-middle-class home entertainment during the Victorian era, and historical and literary tableaus were a favorite subject of early photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Roger Fenton. In the same spirit, some of Dodgson's sitters portray literary or mythic characters, as when the actresses Elizabeth and Ellen Terry pose as the captive Andromeda and her rescuer, Perseus.

At other times Dodgson presents his sitters as symbols. Thus a young girl pretends to sleep and becomes an archetype of childhood innocence, and a sad-eyed little boy clutching a sword embodies the gulf between boyhood and manhood. While Dodgson had a special ability to capture the living personality of his child sitters, Mr. Nickel contends that he, like Oscar Gustav Rejlander and other photographers of the time, also believed that the art form should illustrate abstract ideas, like waking versus dreaming or a child's view of the world versus an adult's.

"We misconstrue these pictures if we define photography as being about actual things and concrete reality," Mr. Nickel said. To Dodgson and other Victorians, "photographs were meant to catalog visions that were essentially literary. The artificiality is part of the point."

But modernism prizes photography as a means of capturing the real. "By the standards of modernism, they're not very good pictures," Mr. Nickel said. "But if we see them as deliberately doing something set up, rather than found, and theatrical, rather than authentic, they start looking a lot like Cindy Sherman. Through a series of reactions and counter-reactions, postmodernist photography gets us back to the Victorians."

If our modernist eyes see these photographs as stilted and even somewhat creepy, our modern-day anxieties about children and sexuality make Dodgson's pictures of little girls in nightgowns and off-the-shoulder costumes seem more than a little perverse.

The British author Karoline Leach has argued against that view of Dodgson in her 1999 book, "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild," which documents that, far from being a girl-loving, woman-hating recluse, Dodgson was a popular man about town whose intimate friendships with a great many women caused considerable scandal. She points out that Dodgson was making his pictures at a time when cheesecake photos of little girls were a wildly popular art form. To his contemporaries these were depictions of innocence and goodness with no more sexual content than we see in pictures of cuddly kittens and puppies.

"In that era, adoration of little girls was trendy, it was cool, it was fashionable," Ms. Leach said. "If we don't see that, we're only seeing our own prejudices."

She noted that her findings have been greeted with hostility by, of all people, diehard Lewis Carroll fans. "I thought they would be pleased to hear that he wasn't necessarily a pedophile," she said. "But some people, for whatever reason, seem to need to believe that Carroll was strange."

Mr. Taylor finds our era's obsession with Dodgson's presumed deviance profoundly unfair. "I'm very saddened that this is now the issue, rather than the quality of his writing and his photography and his mathematics," he said. "If he knew how he's become a stalking horse for all our fears, he would recoil in horror."