A Victorian Pioneer: The Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is now recognised as one of the most iconic photographers of the 19th Century.
Born into an Anglo-French family living in colonial India (she was one of the legendary Pattle sisters), she married a British lawyer, and had five children, before taking up photography in her late-forties.
Many of Cameron’s photographs have a distinctly Victorian vibe.
Their melancholic theatricality - and the way they draw upon themes such as mythology, religious allegory, and the Victorians’ love of nature - capture a look/style that is very much of its time.
It is not difficult, for example, to spot the stylistic similarities between Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting La Ghirlandata…
…and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph Pomona.
Or to compare Rossetti’s painting The Beloved…
…with Cameron’s photograph May Day.
But some of her portraits are far more ‘modern’, and one of my favourites is of the bullish essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle.
There’s something about how Carlyle’s head emerges from the intensely dark background that creates a striking sense of movement.
And the way the light catches his silvery-grey hair/beard, and one of his eyes is shrouded in darkness, communicates so much about Carlyle’s charisma, forceful personality, and uncompromising beliefs.
Being a member of influential social circles enabled Cameron to photograph a whole host of powerful men.
She photographed everyone from the poet Alfred Tennyson and the painter George Frederic Watts to the dramatist Henry Taylor and the scientist John Herschel.
Considering the patriarchal culture at that time, it’s unsurprising that these photographs secured Cameron a degree of critical acclaim.
And it is easy to imagine that Cameron’s great niece, Virginia Woolf, might, in part, have had her illustrious great aunt in mind when, in A Room of One’s Own, she wrote ‘women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’.
But it would be totally wrong to see Cameron as a docile servant to the male elite.
Many of her photographs are of women, and she was ferociously independent.
In fact, despite the British art establishment’s attempts to belittle and sideline her, Julia Margaret Cameron kicked against patriarchal forces throughout much of her adult life.
James Lee © 2024
I really enjoyed reading From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography by Victoria Olsen.
The exhibition Portraits to Dream In: Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron at the National Portrait Gallery in London (open until 16th June) is brilliant too.
Thank you, James. I knew nothing about Julia Margaret Cameron so this was an enjoyable and enlightening introduction to her work.
Beautiful post! I’m a little obsessed with Virginia Woolf, and wonder what she thought about her great-aunt, and about her mother’s relationship to Julia.