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DAY 173 | FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS |
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
THE POETRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
As a photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron had the goal of capturing the beauty she saw and securing a place for photography as a fine art. Her photographs resembled oil paintings, with her signature poetic and painterly style, created with long exposures, soft focus, and dramatic lighting. These qualities carried through her portraits and her more imaginative, illustrative photographs, which were staged scenes influenced by literary, religious, and historical works.
She was easily one of the most prolific and well-known photographers of her time, recognized as particularly experimental and influential. However, her career only spanned 11 years and did not begin until her daughter gave her a camera for her 48th birthday. She quickly became obsessed and was soon coercing her circle of friends, family, and servants to model for her.
The wife of a retired judge, Cameron moved in the highest circles of Victorian society, photographing the most famous intellectuals and artists of her time, including Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Edward Burne-Jones, and her neighbor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, for whom she illustrated Idylls of the King.
Although she was an artist first, Cameron was also a shrewd businesswoman, and catalogued and copyrighted every one of her images, which is why they are still in existence today. Additionally, she used the newer, wet collodion process, which was quite labor-intensive and dangerous, and produced a sharp negative from which multiple prints could be made. Because photography was still quite a new art form, her photographs are often the only existing photographs of these important historical figures. —GC