JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

The sweetness of freedom



Julia Margaret Cameron (English, 1815–1879)
Zoe, Maid of Athens
1866 
Albumen silver print from glass negative 
The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, and Muriel Kallis Newman Gifts, 1997 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1997.382.38)




It is said that her last word was “beauty”. It was in Ceylon where Julia Margaret Cameron died on January 26, 1879. Just sixteen years before she had started her career as a photographer thanks to a camera as a Christmas gift from her daughter and son-in-law. Suddenly, Julia Margaret started to work with it looking for capturing all the beauty around her, even designing ways to get it, and finally creating new and personal beauties as a result of her photographs and becoming one of the greatest portraitists in history. As she wrote in her unfinished autobiography titled Annals of My Glass House "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied. Its difficulty enhanced the value of the pursuit."

What one can see in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron is not only a portrait. Effectively, and effect is a very proper word in her case, one experiences a kind of aura of the people portrayed, mainly celebrities of the time and photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes. In both cases we find this kind of aura effect giving us the feeling of getting into the spirit of the characters. It’s deeply interesting the fact she admitted she had no knowledge of the art of photography. Julia Margaret Cameron didn’t know how to focus a face, where to place the dark box, and it took her long hours of experiments to achieve her first image. But within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland and friend of Victorian artists, poets, and thinkers. "From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour," she wrote, "and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour."1 David Wilkie Wynfield, British painter and photographer, associated with a group of other artists who became known as the St. John's Wood Clique, was one of her first references. He taught her the basic techniques of soft-focus and she expressed her admiration to him writing "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success"2 .

She developed a photography based on long exposures to an almost blind light carefully directed what created a kind of blur which along with allowing a slight movement of the portrayed gave as a result a work full of intimacy and which breaths life. Some of her contemporaries ridiculed her work treating her just as an amateur but she continued a prolific career with a strongly developed business sense and registering each of her photographs with the copyright office and keeping detailed records. Thanks to that attitude we all can enjoy her artistic work in retrospectives like the current one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featuring pieces from each of Cameron's three major bodies of work: portraits of men "great thro' genius," including painter G. F. Watts, poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, scientist Sir John Herschel, and philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle; women "great thro' love," including relatives, neighbours, and household staff, often titled as literary, historical, or biblical subjects; and staged groupings such as her illustrations for Tennyson's Idylls of the King or her Annunciation in the style of Perugino. She gave us beauty until the end.

Julia Margaret Cameron . A selection here

Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Julia Margaret Cameron
Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
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