Julia Margaret Cameron
|
|
Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11 1815 - January 26 1879) was an British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India. She was from a family of celebrated beauties and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. For example, each sister had an adjective which they used as a nickname. Her sisters had nicknames like "beauty". Julia's nickname was "talent". This instilled in Julia an obsession with idealized beauty.
In 1838, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a wealthy tea baron who was twenty years older than she. After she married children kept her busy. In 1848 Charles Cameron retired and the family moved to England. Cameron's sister, Sarah Prinsep, had been living in England and hosted a salon at Little Holland House where famous artists and writers regularly visited.
When her children had grown up Cameron felt lonely and bored. In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old her daughter gave her camera as a present to help with the loneliness. Cameron's goal was to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied" Her portraits usually have a dreamlike Pre-Raphaelite quality. They are thought to be among the most beautiful of early photographers combining artistic merit with atmosphere. The bulk of her photographs fit into two categories: celebrity portraits and illustrations for literary works.
Cameron sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House which gave her fabulous connections. Cameron had her friends, many of whom happened to be famous Victorian celebrities, pose for pictures. Her list of portraits reads like a who's who of Victorian celebrities: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry, George Frederic Watts and the list goes on. Most of these portraits are cropped very close around the subject's face and are in soft focus. They have a distinctive feel. Frequently one can feel the personality of the subject. This is no accident. Cameron knew these celebrities personally and tried to capture who they were when she photographed them. At the time she sold her work through dealers in London. Careful attention to the business side is one reason that so many of her works survive today. She registered each photograph with the copyright office and kept good records. Today these portraits are important because they are often the only photograph that we have of these historical figures. (We have lots of paintings and drawings, but photography was a new medium so almost no one was taking photos of these people. Also photography was not technologically easy to do at that time and not many people had cameras.)
Cameron's posed illustrations represent the other half of her work. She frequently depicted relatives as characters from literary works when she photographed them. For example she photographed her niece as Beatrice Cenci, a historical figure. Her 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. Cameron would carefully drape cloth to get shadows on the folds of the cloth. Draped cloth with ripples was popular in paintings to add visual interest. Today these posed works tend to be dismissed by art critics. Nevertheless they represent an important self awareness in photography. Cameron saw them as art just as an oil painting was art.
In 1875 the Camerons moved back to India. Julia continued to practice photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also here she did not have access to the celebrity artistic community as she had at Little Holland House. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this Cameron took fewer pictures here than she had in England. 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's photographic career was short (about 12 years) and came late in life. Her work had a huge impact on the development of photography, especially her close cropped portraits which are still mimicked today. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight can still be visited today.
External links
- Julia Margaret Cameron Trust (http://www.dimbola.co.uk/)de:Julia Margaret Cameron