The Norman Album. Julia Margaret Cameron · Public domain · source

Julia Margaret Cameron

Public domain1815-1879·British·photography·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was born in Calcutta and died at Kalutara in Ceylon. She took up photography at forty-eight, working from her house, Dimbola, at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, and in about twelve years made close portraits of Tennyson, Darwin, Carlyle and Herschel, as well as Madonna groups and scenes from poetry.

Why they matter

Cameron wanted a photograph to be art, and she was willing to lose sharpness to get there. Her close, deliberately out-of-focus heads, with the scratches and smudges of the wet collodion plate left in, broke every rule the photographic press of the day held to, and they are now counted among the most important images of the nineteenth century in any medium. She was an amateur who worked like a professional: she registered her pictures, exhibited them, and from 1865 sold them through the London dealers Colnaghi.

What to buy

Originals are not realistic. Her albumen prints are museum and auction-house objects, and the deluxe Idylls of the King with twelve full-size prints is rarer still. Prints: her work is public domain, so reproductions are everywhere, and quality depends on the scan. Look for one made from a good museum photograph of a real print, keeping the warm brown of the albumen and the flaws she meant to leave in; a print "cleaned up" to crisp grey has lost what makes it hers. Books: the standard book is Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, edited by Julian Cox and Colin Ford (Getty, 2003), a catalogue raisonne of every known image, large and best found used. The smaller way in is Marta Weiss's V&A book of 2015, over 100 images drawn from the museum that bought her work in her lifetime.

Notes

The V&A has the largest holding to start with: it bought 80 of her photographs in 1865, and more of her prints have come in with the Royal Photographic Society collection. The Met, the Getty, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Portrait Gallery in London hold more. Dimbola is now a museum run by the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust. Her great-niece Virginia Woolf wrote a comic play about the Freshwater circle, Freshwater, and in 1926 edited a book of her photographs with Roger Fry, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. Public domain.

Story

Cameron was given her first camera at Christmas 1863 by her daughter and son-in-law, with the words "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater." She was forty-eight. On 29 January 1864 she photographed nine-year-old Annie Philpot and labelled the print "My first perfect success in the complete Photograph." Within two years the South Kensington Museum, today's V&A, had bought eighty of her photographs, and in 1868 it gave her two of its rooms as a portrait studio; the V&A now calls her its first artist-in-residence.

The professional press was less kind. The Photographic News called her work "smudged, torn, dirty, undefined, and in some cases almost unreadable." She carried on regardless, hunting down the great men of her day as sitters and, in 1874, illustrating Tennyson's Idylls of the King at his request. When the book's small reproductions disappointed her, she issued her own edition with full-size photographs.

In 1875 the Camerons left for Ceylon, where their sons ran the family plantations. They travelled with a cow, her photographic equipment and two coffins, in case such things should not be available in the East. She made fewer than thirty photographs there, and died in 1879.

Key works

Annie (January 1864) - V&A
J.F.W. Herschel (April 1867) - V&A, Getty
Julia Jackson (1867) - V&A
Zuleika (1871) - V&A

Julia Margaret Cameron

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also