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home > exhibitions > julia margaret cameron: victorian photographer
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| Julia Margaret Cameron: Victorian Photographer
Tuesday, March 17, 1998 - Sunday, June 7, 1998
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Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was one of the most original British photographers of the nineteenth century. Cameron took up photography later in life, presented at age forty-eight with a camera by her daughter, and became one of the most colorful personalities in the history of photography. Passionate about the possibilities of the process, she dedicated herself to its pursuit with intense enthusiasm: on her family property on the Isle of Wight, she converted a coal house into a darkroom and a chicken coop into a studio.
The Pre-Raphaelite painters inspired Cameron, and her photographs are frequently allegorical, representing religious, antique, and literary themes. She recruited her friends, family, servants, and even passers-by to pose for her. Among her friends were eminent Victorian writers, artists, and intellectuals, including her neighbor the poet-laureate Alfred Tennyson and renowned beauties, such as her niece Julia Jackson (later the mother of Virginia Woolf). She frequently photographed her servants, whom she often selected for their looks, such as Mary Hillier (pictured here in the role of Adriana, from an 1860s novel). She also made strikingly bold photographs of children, including a series of large-scale heads such as the portrait of Kate Keown above.
Cameron produced some of the most immediate and powerful portraits executed in any medium. Ambitious from the start, she considered herself an artist who made photographs rather than a mere photographer. Spontaneous and intuitive, Cameron was more interested in capturing the essence of her subject than in mastering perfect camera technique. Her pictures were innovative for their expressive use of soft-focus and for their large scale and close-up perspective. Cameron’s sensitivity to nuances of light and shadow was so profound that she can without exaggeration be described as "Rembrandt with a camera." She influenced the vision of generations of photographers who came after her.
"Julia Margaret Cameron: Victorian Photographer" includes approximately eighty-five photographs and is drawn extensively from the Michael Wilson Collection, London, supplemented by loans from northeast American collections. The exhibition is inspired by an earlier Cameron exhibition called "Annals of My Glass House: Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron," largely based on the Wilson collection and organized by the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, Claremont, California. |
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