Edited by me from Wikipedia
Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11, 1815
– January 26, 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the
most important portraitists of the 19th century, known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian
men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology,
Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women
and children.
Cameron took up photography at
age 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. Her photography
career was short but productive; she made around 900 photographs over a 12-year
period.
Cameron's work was contentious in
her own time. Critics lambasted her softly focused and unrefined images and
considered her illustrative photographs amateurish and hammy. However, her
portraits of respected men (such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin, and Sir John
Herschel) have been consistently praised, both in her own life and in reviews
of her work since. Her images have been described as "extraordinarily
powerful" and "wholly original", and she has been credited with
producing the first close-ups in the history of the medium.
Essay: Julia
Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
In December 1863, little more
than a year after Roger Fenton retired from photography and sold his equipment,
Julia Margaret Cameron received her first camera. It was a gift from her
daughter and son-in-law, given with the words “It may amuse you, Mother, to try
to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.” Cameron was forty-eight, a
mother of six, and a deeply religious, well read, somewhat eccentric friend of
many of Victorian England’s greatest minds: the painter G. F. Watts; the poets
Robert Browning, Henry Taylor, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbor at
Freshwater on the Isle of Wight; the scientists Charles Darwin and Sir John
Herschel; and the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. In the decade that
followed the gift, the camera became far more than an amusement to her: “From
the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it
has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.”
Her mesmerizing portraits and figure studies on literary and biblical themes
were unprecedented in her time and remain among the most highly admired of
Victorian photographs.
The gift of the camera in
December 1863 came at a moment when her husband Charles was in Ceylon attending
to the family’s coffee plantations, when their sons were grown or away at
boarding school, and when their only daughter, Julia, had married and moved
away. Photography became Cameron’s link to the writers, artists, and scientists
who were her spiritual and artistic advisors, friends, neighbors, and
intellectual correspondents. “I began with no knowledge of the art,” she wrote.
“I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my
first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy
side of the glass.” No matter. She was indefatigable in her efforts to master
the difficult steps in producing negatives with wet collodion on glass plates.
Although she may have taken up photography as an amateur and sought to apply it
to the noble noncommercial aims of art, she immediately viewed her activity as
a professional one, vigorously copyrighting, exhibiting, publishing, and
marketing her photographs. Within eighteen months she had sold eighty prints to
the Victoria and Albert Museum, established a studio in two of its rooms, and
made arrangements with the West End printseller Colnaghi’s to publish and sell
her photographs.
Cameron had no interest in
establishing a commercial studio, however, and never made commissioned
portraits. Instead, she enlisted friends, family, and household staff in her
activities, often costuming them as if for an amateur theatrical, aiming to
capture the qualities of innocence, virtue, wisdom, piety, or passion that made
them modern embodiments of classical, religious, and literary figures. A parlor
maid was transformed into the Madonna, her husband into Merlin, a neighbor’s
child into the infant Christ or, with swan’s wings attached, into Cupid or an
angel from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Her artistic goals for photography,
informed by the outward appearance and spiritual content of fifteenth-century
Italian painting, were wholly original in her medium. She aimed for neither the
finish and formalized poses common in the commercial portrait studios, nor for
the elaborate narratives of other Victorian “high art” photographers such as H.
P. Robinson and O. G. Rejlander. Her aspirations were, she said, “to ennoble
Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining
the real and the Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible
devotion to poetry and beauty.” As she wrote to Herschel, “I believe in other
than mere conventional topographic photography—map-making and skeleton
rendering of feature and form.”
Even allowing for slight movement
as a positive attribute, posing for Cameron was no easy task. One of her
models—or “victims” as Tennyson called them—left a vivid description of a
photographic session with Cameron: “The studio, I remember, was very untidy and
very uncomfortable. Mrs. Cameron put a crown on my head and posed me as the
heroic queen. … The exposure began. A minute went over and I felt as if I must
scream, another minute and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of
my head; a third, and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy;
a fourth, and the crown, which was too large, began to slip down my forehead; a
fifth—but here I utterly broke down, for Mr. Cameron, who was very aged, and
had unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came in the wrong places, began
to laugh audibly, and this was too much for my self-possession, and I was
obliged to join the dear old gentleman.”
Her photographs were not
universally admired, especially by fellow photographers. The Photographic
Journal, reviewing her submissions to the annual exhibition of the Photographic
Society of Scotland in 1865, reported with a condescension that infuriated her:
“Mrs. Cameron exhibits her series of out-of-focus portraits of celebrities. We
must give this lady credit for daring originality, but at the expense of all
other photographic qualities. A true artist would employ all the resources at
his disposal, in whatever branch of art he might practise. In these pictures,
all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the
art are prominently exhibited. We are sorry to have to speak thus severely on
the works of a lady, but we feel compelled to do so in the interest of the
art.” The Illustrated London News countered, describing her portraits as “the
nearest approach to art, or rather the most bold and successful applications of
the principles of fine-art to photography.” The Photographic Journal rebutted:
“Slovenly manipulation may serve to cover want of precision in intention, but
such a lack and such a mode of masking it are unworthy of commendation.”
Wilhelm Vogel reported the stir that her photographs provoked the following
year in Berlin, where they won Cameron the gold medal: “Those large unsharp
heads, spotty backgrounds, and deep opaque shadows looked more like bungling
pupils’ work than masterpieces. And for this reason many photographers could
hardly restrain their laughter, and mocked at the fact that such photographs
had been given a place of honour. … But, little as these pictures moved the
photographers who only looked for sharpness and technical qualities in general,
all the more interested were the artists … [who] praised their artistic value,
which is so outstanding that technical shortcomings hardly count.” Cameron dismissed
the condemnation of the photographic establishment, writing later that it would
have dispirited her “had I not valued that criticism at its worth,” basking
instead in the positive judgment of artists and friends.
Seen with historical perspective,
it is clear that Cameron possessed an extraordinary ability to imbue her
photographs with a powerful spiritual content, the quality that separates them
from the products of commercial portrait studios of her time. In a dozen years
of work, effectively ended by the Camerons’ departure for Ceylon in 1875, the
artist produced perhaps 900 images—a gallery of vivid portraits and a mirror of
the Victorian soul.
Malcolm Daniel
Department of Photographs, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 2004
