New York’s Multimedia Art Museum is showing an exhibition of photographs by the legendary Julia Margaret Cameron. The name of lady photographer is known to anyone who is even superficially acquainted with the history of photography. Cameron was not a professional, that is, someone who worked in a studio with clients, or collaborated on government projects, or in any other way made a living from photography. There are many reasons for this. First, because of her social standing, Julia didn’t need to work. Secondly, had such a need nevertheless arisen, it is unlikely that she, a woman of the 19th century, would have chosen photography as a means of earning a living.
We thank the Multimedia Art Museum, New York, for providing us with Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs.
Henry Herschel Gay Cameron.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Photography is a relatively young medium of aesthetic expression. From its first steps, it became one of the most democratic of the arts. For a number of social reasons, the ratio of famous men to women in the creative professions is very unequal, but in photography this distortion is perhaps least noticeable. The first women to deal with photographic technology, whose names are known in history, were Constance Talbot, the wife of the inventor of the negative-positive process, and Anne Atkins, an English botanist.
Unfortunately, not a single photograph of the first woman named has survived, and we can say nothing about her contribution to history. But the latter was the author of the world’s first scientific work, illustrated not with drawings made by human hands but with prints left by nature itself on a photosensitive surface. Anne Atkins’s book Algae of Britain, with photograms in cyanotype technique, was published in 1843, six months before Talbot’s famous photobook, The Pencil of Nature.
The existence of many celebrated women photographers in the twentieth century is not surprising. Things were a little different in the 19th century, but even this epic time of pioneer photographers knows their heroines. Just like their male counterparts, they created something new and interesting in a field where there were few high models to follow and had to create them on their own, guided by their own ideas of beauty, whatever they might be.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
These are the peculiarities of an era that did not allow most women to successfully master a number of professions considered suitable only for the other half of humanity. Julia was a keen amateur, of whom there were many among both men and upper and middle class women. That is, a person who had the equipment, mastered the technology, and put his ideas into practice among like-minded people, sometimes even exhibiting, publishing, and getting reviews in the press.
She took portraits of famous people, her contemporaries, and left a considerable number of staged photographs in the Victorian spirit – of heroic men, gentle women and adorable children. They all have the appearance of beautiful dreamers, lofty, enlightened, melancholic and wise, untouched by the hustle and bustle of material daily life. Mrs. Cameron is always referred to when talking about photographers associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. She is now an indisputable classic of photography, and although the attitude to the artistic merits of her work remains ambiguous, its historical value is unquestioned.
Julia Margaret was typical and atypical of her time. Her behavior, her way of life and her photographs themselves were not exactly typical, but typical were her views on art and the aesthetic moods of the era, which she acted as an agent of as a photographer who considered herself an artist. She left her descendants several hundred pictures, some of which are recognized as masterpieces and some of which bring a condescending smile to the critics, but still invariably something fascinating. They are revisited again and again and examined from different perspectives, analyzed on the one hand as a document of the era, and on the other as an aesthetic object. In fact, any work of art is both at the same time.
The camera came to Julia Cameron in 1863, at the height of the “business card boom,” when the mass distribution of cheap, business card-sized prints caused some masters of photography to become disappointed in the fate of their noble medium, as in the behavior of their colleagues who readily rushed to please the unassuming tastes of the mass public. Mrs. Cameron was a 48-year-old woman, the wife of a distinguished gentleman who had held an honorary post in the English administration in Calcutta and owned coffee plantations in Ceylon.
She had six children of her own and an equal number of adopted children, a house in London and another on the Isle of Wight, and a large social circle that included not only her many relatives but also the cream of the British intellectual elite: artists, writers, scientists. One of Julia’s sisters, Margaret, hosted social gatherings that included Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and John Herschel. In the village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, her neighbor was the celebrated writer Alfred Tennyson her friend and mentor was the painter George Frederick Watts among the Cameron family’s guests, friends, and correspondents were Carlyle, Longfellow, Thackeray, Trollope, Whistler, Ruskin and the writer George Frederick Watts.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Mrs. Cameron was an extremely active and active person, not only busy in the affairs of the family, but taking a lively part in the lives of her wonderful acquaintances. Each month she wrote three hundred letters and kept Frechwater’s little telegraph busy, sending at least six telegrams a day. Energy and interest in life forced her to be in constant motion and perform her plans at lightning speed.
It cost her nothing to organize the servants and the household to cut a window in a guest bedroom that was too dark, to glaze and hang curtains while the guest was away, or to destroy in one night the tired vegetable garden and arrange in its place an evenly trimmed lawn. Or, during insomnia as a guest, to decorate the boring furniture in the house of her hosts with translated pictures. The problems and joys of friends and relatives were no idle interest to Mrs. Cameron. Although many lamented her irrepressible desire to surround everyone with love and care, everyone admitted that it was quite sincere.
The irregularity of Lady Cameron was noted by all. Her behavior was entirely independent, sometimes strange, sometimes ridiculous and defiant, and the various entertaining stories of her life, her amusing antics, are sure to come up in all the more or less detailed biographies. But since the lady’s noble origins, intelligence, erudition, and good-heartedness were not in doubt, no one considered her actions improper – they were considered eccentric, and eccentricity is quite a legitimate feature of the English character.
In 1863, Mr. Cameron and his sons left for Ceylon to attend to the affairs of the plantations. The family’s financial difficulties and separation from her family made Ms. Cameron sad, and it was at that moment that her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera with the words, “This might amuse you, mother, in your retreat in Freshwater.”. Mrs. Cameron embarked on her new occupation with enthusiasm and determination-just as she approached any task that had to be done. “I made a laboratory in a coal barn and a studio out of a chicken coop. The chickens got their freedom. No longer did my boys eat fresh eggs, and chicken society was replaced by a society of poets, prophets, artists, and lovely girls, who were alternately captured in a modest little country studio.”.
All of the above intellectual company were photographed by Mrs. Cameron one by one, and some more than once. Photography became the vigorous lady’s main occupation for the next eleven years. It was photography that allowed Julia to become a creator like those around her, “Britain’s finest men who shaped a century.”.
In the nineteenth century photography was largely considered a purely mechanical medium, having more to do with technology than creativity, and its attempts to claim the field of Fine Arts were repeatedly challenged, criticized and ridiculed. But for many, photography was also a way of transforming the image into an artistic form in no lesser degree than painting. For intellectuals who did not wield the brush and pencil, but had a love of all that is beautiful and sublime in Nature, Art and Man, it became a way of embodying philosophical views and an aesthetic creed. These were the people of the gentleman and polymath William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype, and the “lady amateur” Julia Margaret Cameron.
Cameron’s creative legacy is clearly divided into two parts: portraits and staged scenes. In both cases, she was doing something tangibly different from both the products of professional portrait studios and the “artistic photography” that was done by famous masters like Raylander and Henry Robinson. Her style of portraiture was innovative and perhaps even revolutionary for that century. Cameron practiced atypical close-ups and tight cropping. Dark background, sparse lighting, model draped in black cloth. Large format negative, long exposure, soft focus. The out-of-focus maxim became a trademark of Cameron’s photography. “What is a trick, and who said the trick is for all to worship the trick?”
The result was a hazy, hazy image of a person who was a little out of this world, gazing into herself or staying in otherworldly realms, whose luminous, trembling features were protruding from the darkness. That was the way for Mrs. Cameron to convey the spirituality, high intellect and moral perfection of her characters. And this way impressed contemporaries, traditionally accustomed to seeing more detail and precise detail in a portrait, and descendants, some of whom considered Julia Margaret one of the finest portraitists of her time.
Cameron’s narrative productions are allegories or illustrations of various subjects: mythological, biblical, Shakespearean, medieval, etc. p. All those sublime springs which equally attracted painters. Opus Magnum for Cameron was the illustration of Alfred Tennyson’s poetic cycle about King Arthur, The Royal Idylls, which the poet himself asked the photographer to do.
In her pursuit of the perfect embodiment of her idea Cameron spared neither servants, nor relatives, nor guests, nor passers-by who happened to meet her on the walk. Not every model was suitable to personify such categories as Moderation, Melancholia, “May Day,” or characters like Zenobia, Hypatia, Pomona, or the Virgin Mary. Cameron would spend weeks agonizingly searching for the right Lancelot or Iago – where age, looks, expression and an elusive sense of authenticity would come together perfectly. If the perfect model was found, she could hardly avoid the inevitable fate of being photographed by Julia Cameron..
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
“Aunt Julia appears, an awful old woman, stout and stocky, utterly devoid of the beauty and grace of her sisters. She’s wearing a dark dress covered in chemicals and smelling the same . Her plump face has a determined expression, her gaze is penetrating, and her voice is harsh and dry, though it is not without its pleasantness. And here we are forced into the service of the Camera. We pretend to be Christmas angels.
We wear modest robes, heavy swan wings tied around our frail shoulders, and Aunt Julia ruthlessly ruffles our hair, destroying our dull, neat hairstyles. No wonder the celestial protectors look troubled and gloomy in the photograph. “Stop right there!”- commands an aunt, and we stand for hours, staring at the divine child in a sham manger. A child asleep, its disturbed parents removed from the room and there is no way they could have saved it. They, like us, can only resign themselves to waiting for Aunt Julia to finish.”
The aforementioned posing for hours is no exaggeration at all. Cameron deliberately used very sparse directional lighting, achieving a “Rembrandtian” effect, and a large format negative. Her first camera was adapted to an 11×9 inch format, and her second to a 15×12. The exposure times for which those posing had to sit still the photographer kindly informed them that they could blink and breathe, but had to keep their eyes fixed on one spot, or her expensive emulsions would be wasted ranged from three to seven minutes. If a photograph did not turn up on its first try, the procedure was repeated until an acceptable result was achieved.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there had long since been no need for such long exposures. In a typical portrait studio, at worst, you had to pose for the photographer for about ten seconds. And such a large format had by this time not been used en masse, becoming the fate of only courageous enthusiasts with special pretensions. But Cameron, achieving the mood and impression she wanted, had her own approach to technology, which was becoming a real torture for her models.
Cameron worked as an independent artist, guided only by her own opinions and those of her friends. An artist who was completely free in her choice of subjects and models, who despised convention and had very little contact with the professional world. She also cared little about the technical quality of her work. In addition to the freehand manipulation of focus and “sketchy” blurring, her prints often suffered from mechanical damage to the negative and were covered in smudges and scratches.
And Julia Margaret never corrected or retouched anything, which was a great source of pride for her. She wasn’t troubled by technical shortcomings – what mattered was the artistic intent. Alienated from professional circles, Cameron was nevertheless a member of the Photographic Society of London and exhibited with its members at international exhibitions and won awards and had her own solo exhibitions where prints could be purchased.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The “lady amateur’s” work was known to the public and to photographers. They were perceived ambiguously. The newspapers would occasionally publish well-intentioned reviews written by friends of Cameron’s, noting her taste, talent and the undeniable artistic merit of her pictures. The photographic press was puzzled, but admitted that if such a work found an enthusiastic admirer among respectable people, it must have something in it. There was a controversy between The Photographic News and The Photographic Journal over her work: isn’t it strange that such photographs are awarded prizes when they don’t deserve to be exhibited at all?.
A sincere devotion to beauty and the search for the ideal made Cameron, among other things, a very democratic artist, who, regardless of class, profession or social standing, looked only at whether a person had enough qualities to become the embodiment of her idea. Cameron is essentially a high photographic humanist, for whom both the maid, the celebrated poet, and the crown prince were equally interesting natures. Not because of social status and personal history, but as bearers of various manifestations of the divine essence. This gives her work another interesting dimension.
Cameron’s contemporaries romantic as she was who praised her photographs must have sensed her sincere enthusiasm for and adoration of beauty and shared her feelings. “Beauty” was the last word Julia Margaret Cameron said on her deathbed. Many of her works may look sentimental, naive and funny now, but they certainly reflect the mentality of an entire era.
When the first edition of Gernsheim’s book about Cameron was published in 1948, the “lady amateur” became a full-fledged part of history. Her fame financially culminated in 1974, when one of her portraits of women was sold at Sotheby’s for the highest price for photography at the time, £1,500.
Most of Cameron’s photographs are now in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum although there are collections of her work in many other collections including those in the United States. Julia Margaret generously gave her photographs and whole albums to people ranging from gardeners to royalty as a gesture of love, gratitude or sympathy.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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, how do you find peace and relaxation? What activities or strategies do you find helpful in escaping the busyness and finding tranquility in your day?