Cameron, Julia Margaret
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Cameron used large glass plate negatives, something that was usually used to shoot landscapes. This technique for making her images required long exposure times, which meant that her sitters to sit still for long periods of time during the exposures. Since sitting still for such long periods was difficult for the sitters, Cameron's images often came out soft and out of focus. But she liked these soft focus portraits and the streak marks on her negatives and chose to make these irregularites part of her pictures. Although her photographs lacked the sharpness that other photographers at the time aspired towards, they succeeded in conveying the emotional and spiritual aura of the sitter. Cameron's ambition as a photographer was to "secure [for photography] the character and uses of high art by combining real and ideal, and sacrificing nothing of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty." | Cameron used large glass plate negatives, something that was usually used to shoot landscapes. This technique for making her images required long exposure times, which meant that her sitters to sit still for long periods of time during the exposures. Since sitting still for such long periods was difficult for the sitters, Cameron's images often came out soft and out of focus. But she liked these soft focus portraits and the streak marks on her negatives and chose to make these irregularites part of her pictures. Although her photographs lacked the sharpness that other photographers at the time aspired towards, they succeeded in conveying the emotional and spiritual aura of the sitter. Cameron's ambition as a photographer was to "secure [for photography] the character and uses of high art by combining real and ideal, and sacrificing nothing of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty." | ||
| − | Cameron was | + | Cameron was noted for great enthusiasm, passion, and even obsessiveness for her photographic work. At her Dimbola house, she converted an old coalhouse into a darkroom and made a glass chicken house into a studio with windows that allowed her to regulate the light. Her subjects often had to sit 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 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]]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, challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio. | + | During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. She was also a determined promoter of her own work. In 1865 she had the first one person exhibition of her photographs at Colnaghis in London, and also presented a folio of her work to the British Museum. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's [[portrait]]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, challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio. |
In 1873 Cameron sent her sister Maria (Mia) Jackson a photo album that was partly empty. She asked her sister to collaborate with her on the proposed project in the years to come by adding images to the album, as she sent them, in the places and the sequence she described. The album had two parts. The front part had photographs and portraits Cameron took of her family and friends, both candidly posed ones and others that acted out staged tableaux. The second half of the album contained pictures by some of Cameron's contemporaries such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Lewis Caroll, plus numerous photographs of paintings and drawings. | In 1873 Cameron sent her sister Maria (Mia) Jackson a photo album that was partly empty. She asked her sister to collaborate with her on the proposed project in the years to come by adding images to the album, as she sent them, in the places and the sequence she described. The album had two parts. The front part had photographs and portraits Cameron took of her family and friends, both candidly posed ones and others that acted out staged tableaux. The second half of the album contained pictures by some of Cameron's contemporaries such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Lewis Caroll, plus numerous photographs of paintings and drawings. | ||
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==Legacy== | ==Legacy== | ||
| − | Cameron was seen as an unconventional and experimental photographer during her time. Now her images are understood as having an important place in the history of photography. Her family albums are both documents of a family's history and a source of insights into Victorian society. | + | Cameron was seen as an unconventional and experimental photographer during her time. Now her images are understood as having an important place in the history of photography. Her family albums are both documents of a family's history and a source of insights into Victorian society. |
| + | |||
| + | George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, holds some 163 of Cameron's pictuers, some of them printed by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn in about 1915 from copy negatives of Cameron's work. Coburn's work is in numerous other museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, the National Portrait Museum in London, the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and others. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with some 250 of her pictures, contains what may be the world's largest collection of Coburn photographs. | ||
Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen née Jackson (1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron which appeared in the first edition of the ''Dictionary of National Biography'', 1886. | Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen née Jackson (1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron which appeared in the first edition of the ''Dictionary of National Biography'', 1886. | ||
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However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when [[Helmut Gernsheim]] wrote a book on her work: | However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when [[Helmut Gernsheim]] wrote a book on her work: | ||
| − | :Gernsheim, H. (1948). [http://worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/2613108 Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work. Famous photographers]. London: Fountain Press; distributed in the USA by Transatlantic Arts, New York. | + | :Gernsheim, H. (1948). [http://worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/2613108 Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work. Famous photographers]. London: Fountain Press; distributed in the USA by Transatlantic Arts, New York. |
==Further reading== | ==Further reading== | ||
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[[Category:1879 deaths]] | [[Category:1879 deaths]] | ||
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Revision as of 21:40, 14 November 2007
Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11 1815 – January 26 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures and tableux.
Cameron's photographic career was short (about 12 years) and came relatively late in her life. Her work had a large impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits, a photographic convention used very much today. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight can still be visited.
Life
Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, India, to James Pattle, a British official of the East India Company, and Adeline de l'Etang, a daughter of French aristocrats. Julia Margaret was part of a large family, the fourth of ten children, and, in turn, had a large family of her own. She was part of the upper class, and enjoyed a rich life and made the acquaintence of a number of famous people. She was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. For example, each sister had an attribute which she used as a nickname. Her sisters had nicknames such ax "beauty". Julia's nickname was "talent". This instilled in Julia an obsession with idealized beauty.
Julia was educated in France, but returned to India in 1834 when she was nineteen. In 1838 she married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta; he was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired and he and Julia and their family moved to London. Cameron's sister, Sarah Prinsep, had been living in London and hosted a salon at Little Holland House, the dower house of Holland House in Kensington, where famous artists and writers regularly visited. In 1860, Cameron visited the estate of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight. Julia was taken with the location and the Cameron family purchased a property on the island soon after. They called it Dimbola Lodge after the family's Ceylon estate.
Photography
Cameron's career as a photographer began in 1863, when she was 48 years old, while her husband was away on a trip. To cheer her from her loneliness, her daughter gave her a camera. Cameron began photographing everyone in sight. 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."[1]
Photography as a practice was then new, so Cameron was free to make her own rules and not be bound to convention. She was not interested in the images being made by other photographers at the time. Instead, she was bent on capturing another kind of photographic truth. She was not concerned with capturing the accuracy of sharp detaild, but wanted to the emotional state of her sitter.
Her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, Alfred Lord Tennyson often brought friends to see the photographer.
Cameron used large glass plate negatives, something that was usually used to shoot landscapes. This technique for making her images required long exposure times, which meant that her sitters to sit still for long periods of time during the exposures. Since sitting still for such long periods was difficult for the sitters, Cameron's images often came out soft and out of focus. But she liked these soft focus portraits and the streak marks on her negatives and chose to make these irregularites part of her pictures. Although her photographs lacked the sharpness that other photographers at the time aspired towards, they succeeded in conveying the emotional and spiritual aura of the sitter. Cameron's ambition as a photographer was to "secure [for photography] the character and uses of high art by combining real and ideal, and sacrificing nothing of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty."
Cameron was noted for great enthusiasm, passion, and even obsessiveness for her photographic work. At her Dimbola house, she converted an old coalhouse into a darkroom and made a glass chicken house into a studio with windows that allowed her to regulate the light. Her subjects often had to sit 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 office and kept detailed records. She was also a determined promoter of her own work. In 1865 she had the first one person exhibition of her photographs at Colnaghis in London, and also presented a folio of her work to the British Museum. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portraits 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, challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
In 1873 Cameron sent her sister Maria (Mia) Jackson a photo album that was partly empty. She asked her sister to collaborate with her on the proposed project in the years to come by adding images to the album, as she sent them, in the places and the sequence she described. The album had two parts. The front part had photographs and portraits Cameron took of her family and friends, both candidly posed ones and others that acted out staged tableaux. The second half of the album contained pictures by some of Cameron's contemporaries such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Lewis Caroll, plus numerous photographs of paintings and drawings.
Most of Cameron's photographs are portraits of members of her family, concentrating on their faces. She wanted to show their natural beauty, and she often asked female sitters to let down their hair so she could show them in a way that they were not accustomed to presenting themselves.
The bulk of Cameron's photographs fit into two categories: closely framed and evocative portraits of both male and female subjects, and illustrative allegories and tableaux 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.
In Cameron's posed photographic 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 Tennyson led to his asking her to photograph illustrations for his Idylls of the King. 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.
Both kinds of pictures are contained in the Mia Album, and it contains some of her most famous pictures. One is The Kiss of Peace, a portrait of a mother and child based on the gospel story of the Visitation. The child gazes down and the mother's lips rest casually on her brow. This can be seen as a quiet image depicting maternal love. Most of Cameron's photographs are peaceful and romantic and have have a spiritual sensibility, with a sombre and contemplative mood. Camerion tried to capture what she saw as the essence of the subject, and she did not photograph action or take much care with backgrounds.
Some Cameron Portraits
Cameron's sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House, which gave her many famous subjects for her portraits. Some of her famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face and are in soft focus. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos.
Later life
In 1875 the Camerons moved back to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). 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 died in Ceylon in 1879.
Legacy
Cameron was seen as an unconventional and experimental photographer during her time. Now her images are understood as having an important place in the history of photography. Her family albums are both documents of a family's history and a source of insights into Victorian society.
George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, holds some 163 of Cameron's pictuers, some of them printed by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn in about 1915 from copy negatives of Cameron's work. Coburn's work is in numerous other museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, the National Portrait Museum in London, the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and others. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, with some 250 of her pictures, contains what may be the world's largest collection of Coburn photographs.
Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen née Jackson (1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron which appeared in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1886.
- Stephen, L. (1886). Dictionary of national biography: vol. VIII. Burton — Cantwell. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.
Julia Stephen was the mother of Virginia Woolf, who wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play Freshwater. Woolf edited, with Roger Fry, a collection of Cameron's photographs:
- Woolf, V., & Fry, R. E. (1926). Victorian photographs of famous men & women. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book on her work:
- Gernsheim, H. (1948). Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work. Famous photographers. London: Fountain Press; distributed in the USA by Transatlantic Arts, New York.
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). Fragment of exhibition catalogue, Annals of my glass house by Julia Margaret Cameron.
- 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: The Museum.
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 - Photographer in Focus. Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
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