Julia Margaret Cameron
Encyclopedia
- For the American author, see Julia CameronJulia CameronJulia B. Cameron is an American teacher, author, artist, poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, composer, and journalist. She is perhaps most famous for her book The Artist's Way...
.
Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
photographer. She became known for her portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
s of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
and other legendary themes.
Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present.
Although her style was not widely appreciated in her own day, her work has had an impact on modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits.
Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
is open to the public.
Early life
Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, to James Pattle, a British official of the East India Company
British East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
, and Adeline de l'Etang, a daughter of French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
aristocrats. Julia was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. As her great-niece Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
wrote in the 1926 introduction to the Hogarth Press collection of Cameron's photographs, "In the trio [of sisters] where...[one] was Beauty; and [one] Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent".
Marriage
Cameron was educated in France, but returned to India, and in 1838 married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, England. Cameron's sister, Sarah Prinsep
Prinsep
Prinsep may mean any of several notable members of the British Prinsep family.The family descended from John Prinsep, an 18th-century merchant who was the son of Rev. John Prinsep, rector of Saundby, Nottinghamshire, and Bicester, Oxfordshire...
, had been living in London and hosted a salon at Little Holland House
Little Holland House
Little Holland House was the dower house of Holland House in Kensington, England. Henry Thoby Prinsep, a director of East India Company and member of the Prinsep family, gained a 21-year lease on it from Henry Fox, 4th Baron Holland thanks to the painter George Frederic Watts, a friend of both the...
, the dower house
Dower house
On an estate, a dower house is usually a moderately large house available for use by the widow of the estate-owner. The widow, often known as the "dowager" usually moves into the dower house from the larger family house on the death of her husband if the heir is married, and upon his marriage if he...
of Holland House in Kensington
Kensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
, where famous artists and writers regularly visited. In 1860, Cameron visited the estate of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
. Julia was taken with the location, and the Cameron family purchased a property on the island soon after. They called it Dimbola Lodge
Dimbola Lodge
Dimbola Lodge was the Isle of Wight home of the Victorian pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron from 1860 to 1875.It is now the home of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, and a photographic museum.-History of the property:...
after the family's Ceylon estate.
Photography
In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."The basic techniques of soft-focus "fancy portrait
Fancy portrait
thumb|200px|Vanessa, by [[Millais]], 1868, Sudley House, Liverpool, a fancy portrait of [[Esther Vanhomrigh]]Fancy portrait is an art historical term for an imaginary portrait of a real or literary character...
s", which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield
David Wilkie Wynfield
David Wilkie Wynfield was a British painter and photographer.Wynfield was distantly related to the Scottish artist David Wilkie, after whom he was named. Born in India, he was originally intended by his family for the priesthood, but instead chose art as a profession...
. She later wrote that "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success".
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....
, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
, often brought friends to see the photographer.
Cameron was sometimes obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also means that we are left with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.
During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
s are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
The bulk of Cameron's photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting.
Portraits
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
, John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...
, William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic.-Biography:Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.He was one of the seven founder members of the...
, Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
, Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
and George Frederic Watts
George Frederic Watts
George Frederic Watts, OM was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life...
. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face and are in soft focus
Soft focus
In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while retaining sharp edges; it is not the same as an...
. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos. Among Cameron's lesser-known images are those she took of Mary Emily ('May') Prinsep, wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, GCMG, PC , the second Governor-General of Australia, was born at Chapel House, Twickenham, in Surrey, England. Named after his father's late friend Arthur Hallam, he was the elder son of Alfred Tennyson, the most popular and prominent poet of late Victorian...
, the elder son of Alfred Tennyson and a British colonial administrator. Cameron's portraits of May Prinsep, taken on the Isle of Wight, show a somewhat plain woman shot head-on and without affect.
Photographic illustrations
Cameron's posed photographic illustrations represent the other half of her work. In these illustrations, she frequently photographed historical scenes or literary works, which often took the quality of oil paintings. However, she made no attempt in hiding the backgrounds. Cameron's friendship with TennysonAlfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....
led to him asking her to photograph illustrations for his Idylls of the King
Idylls of the King
Idylls of the King, published between 1856 and 1885, is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom...
. These photographs are designed to look like oil paintings from the same time period, including rich details like historical costumes and intricate draperies. Today, these posed works are sometimes dismissed by art critics. Nevertheless, Cameron saw these photographs as art, just like the oil paintings they imitated.
Later life
In 1875, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon (now Sri LankaSri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
). Julia continued to practice photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also, in India, she did not have access to Little Holland House's artistic community. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this, Cameron took fewer pictures in India. These pictures were of posed Indian natives, paralleling the posed pictures that Cameron had taken of neighbours in England. Almost none of Cameron's work from India survives. Cameron caught a bad chill and died in Kalutara
Kalutara
Kalutara is a resort town located approximately 40 km south of Colombo in Sri Lanka.- Overview :Once an important spice-trading center, the city's name is derived from the Kalu Ganga River . In the 11th Century, the town was temporarily made a capital on the orders of a South Indian Prince...
, Ceylon in 1879.
Legacy
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, who wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play Freshwater. Woolf edited, with Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
, a collection of Cameron's photographs.
However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim
Helmut Gernsheim
Helmut Erich Robert Kuno Gernsheim was a renowned historian of photography, collector, and photographer.-Biography:Born in Munich, Germany, Gernsheim studied art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich...
wrote a book on her work.
In 1977 Gernsheim noted that although a great photographer, Cameron had "left no mark" on the aesthetic history of Photography because her work was not appreciated by her contemporaries and thus not imitated. But this situation was evidently already changing by then thanks to his popularisation of her work, for instance in 1975 Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her photography of botanicals, nudes and industry.-Life and career:...
had commented "I'd like to see portrait photography go right back to Julia Margaret Cameron. I don't think there's anyone better."
Further reading
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1875). Illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron of Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other poems.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1889). Unfinished autobiography "Annals of my glass house" by Julia Margaret Cameron, written 1874, first published 1889.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1973). Victorian photographs of famous men & fair women. Boston: D.R. Godine.
- Cameron, J. M. (1975). The Herschel album: an album of photographs. London (2 St Martin's Place, WC2H 0HE): National Portrait Gallery.
- Cameron, J. M., & Ford, C. (1975). The Cameron Collection: an album of photographs. Wokingham: Van Nostrand Reinhold for the National Portrait Gallery.
- Cameron, J. M. P., & Weaver, M. (1986). Whisper of the muse: the Overstone album & other photographs. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1994). For my best beloved sister, Mia: an album of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron : an exhibition of works from the Hochberg-Mattis collection organized by the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art MuseumUniversity of New Mexico Art MuseumThe University of New Mexico Art Museum is an art museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque...
. - Wolf, Sylvia, et al. (1998). Julia Margaret Cameron's women. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.
- Lukitsh, Joanne (2001). Julia Margaret Cameron. London: Phaidon.
- Cox, Julian, and Colin Ford (2003). Julia Margaret Cameron: the complete photographs. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
External links
- Julia Margaret Cameron Trust
- The official National Media Museum print website containing many Julia Margaret Cameron prints
- George Eastman House photography collection - 163 selected images
- Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
- Inventory of the Julia Margaret Cameron Family Papers, ca. 1777-1940, including full names of individuals, their identity, and nicknames used within the correspondence
- Julia Margaret Cameron photography as part of 'Victorian Visions' (on loan from V&A Museum) at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Wirral. From December 2007 - March 2008.
- Julia Margaret Cameron Family Papers, 1777-1940. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California A collection of family correspondence and papers touching on the life of English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (active 1860s-1870s), though derived from the estate of her son, Hardinge Hay Cameron, around whom much of the materials revolve.