Julia Margaret Cameron: The Visionary Victorian Photographer
Equipped with a soft and dreamy aesthetic, the British artist revolutionized the world of photography in the 19th century.
Julia Margaret Cameron is regarded as one of Britain's foremost photographers and one of the leading portraitists of the 19th century. She was born on June 11, 1815 in Calcutta (which then belonged to British India), as her father was an official in the British East India Company. She lived and was educated in France from 1818 until 1838 and met her future husband Charles Hay Cameron, a lawyer and investor, in South Africa. They married in India in 1838 and later moved to London in 1845.
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A great lover of photography, she began to practice it seriously at the age of 48, thanks to a camera given to her by her daughter. From that moment on, her passion turned into a sort of mission to capture beauty, especially through portraits. With great enthusiasm, she transformed a chicken coop into a dark room, subjected friends, acquaintances and family to long sessions, and often cheerfully ran after children to use them as models. Cameron also loved to immortalize members of her family and among her favorite models was her niece Julia, mother of the writer Virginia Woolf, who remembered it in her writings.
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The artist developed a particular technique, called "soft focus", giving a dreamy and poetic touch to the portraits of women and children. She became one of the most talented and prolific amateur photographers of the time, endowed with an aesthetic sense that made her a great exponent of Pictorialism, a movement born around the mid-19th century. Initially, photography was considered inferior to other arts, such as painting and sculpture, because the photos were "created" by a device instead of by the artist's hand and because they reproduced reality as it was, without embellishing it with creative genius. Pictorialism aimed to elevate photography to the level of fine art and, for this purpose, the photographers who joined this movement used particular techniques ands special effects to eliminate the realism present in the final image. From this point of view, Cameron's "soft focus" is an excellent example of pictorial photography.
Her shots are sometimes enveloped in an aura of melancholy, as in the photograph Sadness which portrays Ellen Terry, a Shakespearean theater actress. The photo was taken during the actress's first honeymoon, when she was just 17 years old. The model's pose and title introduce a biographical element in the portrait, as they constitute a reference to Ellen's failed marriage (which lasted less than a year) with the much older painter George Frederick Watts. The pictorialism of this image also lies in its empathy and intimacy, as well as the great sense of modernity of the casual pose and expression.
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Although she began photographing as an amateur and never made portraits on commission or opened a real studio for commercial use, Cameron always thought of her photographic activity as a professional endeavor, actively dealing with copyright, publication and marketing of her work. Over the span of about ten years, Julia Margaret Cameron shot over 3,000 large-format images of many famous figures of the time. She photographed writer Lord Alfred Tennyson, who also asked her to illustrate his poem Idylls of the King using costumed characters. Other notable names who posed for her lens were Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Henry Taylor, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, John Herschel, and George Frederic Watts.
Her photographic activity was always supported by her husband who, according to a statement by Cameron herself, joyfully looked at every photo made by his wife and enthusiastically applauded her talent.
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Between 1864 and 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron became a member of the Photographic Society of London and the Photographic Society of Scotland, and also held her first solo exhibition. Her prints generated strong demand across Europe, earning her important awards and honorable mentions.
In 1875, due to her husband's poor health, the low cost of living and to be closer to the family's coffee plantations (badly damaged by a fungus), Cameron and her husband moved to Sri Lanka, where her artistic activity was unfortunately hampered by the difficult finding of photographic materials.
Later, Cameron fell ill and died on the Glencairn estate in Sri Lanka on January 26, 1879. It is said that the last word she uttered was "Beauty" or "Beautiful", which she immortalized in her exquisite shots.
