Julia Margaret Cameron British, 1815-1879

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was one of the greatest portrait photographers of the nineteenth century and among the most original artists to work with the medium in Britain. She took up photography relatively late and pursued it for barely a decade, yet in that time produced the soft-focus portraits of eminent Victorians and the elaborate tableaux drawn from literature, mythology and scripture that contemporaries dismissed as technically incompetent but that are now recognized as among the most compelling expressions of photography’s artistic possibilities. Credited with pioneering the photographic close-up, she sought, in her own words, to ennoble photography and secure for it the uses of high art, uniting the real and the ideal without sacrificing truth. Her sitters included some of the defining figures of Victorian intellectual life, among them Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, John Herschel and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the women and children of her own household. Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were among the first to recognize that her photographs would outlast the reputations of many of those they portrayed.

Born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, she was one of seven sisters whose collective social world became known as Pattledom. In 1838, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and reformer twenty years her senior. The couple settled in England in 1848, where Cameron moved among the artists and writers who gathered at Little Holland House, her sister’s home in London. In 1860, the family acquired Dimbola Lodge at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, becoming neighbors of Tennyson. In December 1863, her daughter gave her a camera. “From the first moment,” Cameron recalled, “the lens became to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor.” Within a year, she had converted a fowl-house into a studio and a coal store into a darkroom, produced Annie, her first successful photograph, and begun registering her prints for copyright.

“What is focus?” she challenged her critics, asking who had the right to determine what constituted legitimate focus. Working in the wet-collodion process and printing on albumen paper, she used large-format negatives that allowed her to make prints without enlargement. Her deliberately soft focus, close framing and dramatic use of light challenged prevailing expectations of photographic precision, asserting instead the expressive possibilities of the medium.

Cameron’s work falls broadly into three categories: portraits, Madonna-like groupings and elaborate tableaux inspired by literature, mythology and the Bible. Her portraits, made at close range and with an unusual intimacy, included those of the poet Robert Browning and the painter G. F. Watts. For her allegorical and narrative compositions, she drew on the people around her. Her parlor maid, Mary Hillier, appeared as both the Madonna and Sappho; her niece Julia Jackson, later the mother of Virginia Woolf, frequently modelled for her; and the Keown children, from the neighboring military barracks, appeared in scenes of idealized childhood and religious sentiment. In 1865, Cameron began selling her work through the London print seller Colnaghi and exhibited at the South Kensington Museum, the only museum to show her work during her lifetime. In 1868, the museum provided her with two rooms to use as a studio. Her photographic illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King followed in 1875.

In 1875, the Camerons moved to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, to be near their sons and the family plantations. Cameron continued to photograph there, although relatively few works from this period survive. She died at Kalutara in 1879, aged sixty-three. Today, the Victoria and Albert Museum holds more than nine hundred of her photographs, the largest collection of her work in the world.