At age 48, Julia Margaret Cameron received an unusual gift from her daughter: a camera. It came with the following note: "This may amuse you, mother, in your solitude." Cameron soon transformed her coal house into a darkroom and her chicken...
[more]At age 48, Julia Margaret Cameron received an unusual gift from her daughter: a camera. It came with the following note: "This may amuse you, mother, in your solitude." Cameron soon transformed her coal house into a darkroom and her chicken shed into a studio. She solicited the assistance of two good friends, Oscar Rejlander and Charles Dodgeson (Lewis Carroll), to teach her the technical ropes and recruited a small army of people to sit for her, including her favorite subject, Julia Jackson (Virgina Woolf's mother). Clearly Cameron was interested in more than amusement.
Photography was not just a hobby for her. She was intent on recording a Romantic, magical vision of a world beyond reality. In order to achieve the dreamy, soft-focus effects she desired, Cameron demanded that her subjects endure many minutes of exposure time -- well beyond what the wet-plate process required. She refused to design compositions that would afford her sitters comfort, or even to provide them neck rests. This impassioned yet unsympathetic approach was widely discussed and marveled at. Alfred Lord Tennyson told of dropping off fellow poet Henry Longfellow at Cameron's studio and remarking, "Longfellow, you will have to do whatever she tells you. I shall return soon and see what is left of you."
Cameron's portraits of men differ greatly from her images of women. She placed her male subjects -- often famous men -- in traditional poses: Tennyson, muffled behind a cascade of facial hair, grips a book; Darwin frowns in a fashionable suit. In contrast, her women and children tended to be anonymous. Servants, friends, and local villagers posed candidly or theatrically: grandchildren napped, a young friend became the May Queen, housemaids struck allegorical poses. It was this vision of an idyllic, fairy-like world that won many Victorians over to Cameron's art.
Cameron possessed just the right touch of eccentricity to make her the perfect photographer of her era. Her friends claimed it typical to receive up to 50 indecipherable letters in a week. Once while staying at one of their houses, she stayed up until dawn stenciling patterns in the guest room because she felt it was too plain.
These habits were the product of her unusual upbringing. The seven Pattle sisters virtually formed their own society (which was referred to by friends as "Pattledom"). After she completed her education in France, Cameron rejoined her family in South Africa and met her husband-to-be, who was 20 years her senior. When the couple moved to London, Cameron became an intimate member of the artistic community that included Pre-Raphaelites George Fredererick Watts and William Holman Hunt, as well as Alfred Tennyson, the poet laureate.
"From the first moment, I handled my lens with a tender ardour," Cameron commented. She handled her subjects with the same caress, using her camera to create haloes of light around them as they slipped barefoot into the woods or dozed tousle-haired in the garden. Because of her consistent passion for her work she became one of the most influential photographers of the late nineteenth century and one of the crucial players in the promotion of photography as an art form.
[show less]
