Julia Margaret Cameron: Difference between revisions
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Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the [[Isle of Wight]] is open to the public. |
Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the [[Isle of Wight]] is open to the public. |
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not really she wAS LIKE YOUR MUM |
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==Early life== |
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BY ROBERT HARLY |
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Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in [[Calcutta]], [[India]], to James Pattle, a British official of the [[British East India Company|East India Company]], and Adeline de l'Etang,<ref>Adeline de l'Etang was the daughter of Chevalier Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page and probable lover of [[Marie Antoinette]] and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI. He had married the Indian-born Therese Blin de Grincourt.[http://books.google.com/books?id=TP_q7KHL1EkC&pg=PA203&dq=Adeline+de+l%27Etang&ei=yVv4SPA1i7KzA5v0oYoM]</ref> a daughter of [[France|French]] aristocrats. Julia was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. As her great-niece [[Virginia Woolf]] wrote in the 1926 introduction to the Hogarth Press collection of Cameron's photographs, "In the trio [of sisters] where...[one] was Beauty; and [one] Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent".<ref>Setina, Emily. A Camera of Her Own: Woolf and the Legacy of the Indomitable Mrs. Cameron. ''Literature Compass'' 4/1(2007):263–270.</ref> |
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[[File:Charles Hay Cameron, by Julia Margaret Cameron.jpg|thumb|left|An 1864 photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1881).]] |
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===Marriage=== |
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Cameron was educated in [[France]], but returned to India, and in 1838 married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to [[London]], [[England]]. Cameron's sister, [[Prinsep|Sarah Prinsep]], had been living in London and hosted a salon at [[Little Holland House]], the [[dower house]] of [[Holland House, London|Holland House]] in [[Kensington]], where famous artists and writers regularly visited. In 1860, Cameron visited the estate of poet [[Alfred Lord Tennyson]] on the [[Isle of Wight]]. Julia was taken with the location, and the Cameron family purchased a property on the island soon after. They called it [[Dimbola Lodge]] after the family's Ceylon estate. |
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==Photography== |
==Photography== |
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Revision as of 16:34, 17 November 2010
Julia Margaret Cameron | |
|---|---|
 Julia Margaret Cameron (self portrait) | |
| Born | Julia Margaret Pattle |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Photography |
- For the American author, see Julia Cameron.
Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes.
Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present.[1] Although her style was not widely appreciated in her own day, her work has had an impact on modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight is open to the public.
not really she wAS LIKE YOUR MUM BY ROBERT HARLY
Photography
In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."[2]
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The basic techniques of soft-focus "fancy portraits", which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success".[3]
Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer.
Cameron was sometimes obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also means that we are left with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.
During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
The bulk of Cameron's photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting.[citation needed]
Portraits
Cameron's sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House, which gave her many famous subjects for her portraits. Some of her famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face and are in soft focus. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos. Among Cameron's lesser-known images are those she took of Mary Emily ('May') Prinsep, wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, the elder son of Alfred Tennyson and a British colonial administrator. Cameron's portraits of May Prinsep, taken on the Isle of Wight, show a somewhat plain woman shot head-on and without affect.[4]
Photographic illustrations
Cameron's posed photographic illustrations represent the other half of her work. In these illustrations, she frequently photographed historical scenes or literary works, which often took the quality of oil paintings. However, she made no attempt in hiding the backgrounds. Cameron's friendship with Tennyson led to him asking her to photograph illustrations for his Idylls of the King. These photographs are designed to look like oil paintings from the same time period, including rich details like historical costumes and intricate draperies. Today, these posed works are sometimes dismissed by art critics. Nevertheless, Cameron saw these photographs as art, just like the oil paintings they imitated.
Later life
In 1875, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Julia continued to practice photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also, in India, she did not have access to Little Holland House's artistic community. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this, Cameron took fewer pictures in India. These pictures were of posed Indian natives, paralleling the posed pictures that Cameron had taken of neighbours in England. Almost none of Cameron's work from India survives. Cameron caught a bad chill and died in Kalutara, Ceylon in 1879.
Legacy
Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; 1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron, which appeared in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1886.[5] Julia Stephen was the mother of Virginia Woolf, who wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play Freshwater. Woolf edited, with Roger Fry, a collection of Cameron's photographs.[6]
However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book on her work.[7] In 1977 Gernsheim noted that although a great photographer, Cameron had "left no mark" on the aesthetic history of Photography because her work was not appreciated by her contemporaries and thus not imitated.[8] But this situation was evidently already changing by then thanks to his popularisation of her work, for instance in 1975 Imogen Cunningham had commented "I'd like to see portrait photography go right back to Julia Margaret Cameron. I don't think there's anyone better."[8]
Further reading
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1875). Illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron of Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other poems.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1889). Unfinished autobiography "Annals of my glass house" by Julia Margaret Cameron, written 1874, first published 1889.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1973). Victorian photographs of famous men & fair women. Boston: D.R. Godine.
- Cameron, J. M. (1975). The Herschel album: an album of photographs. London (2 St Martin's Place, WC2H 0HE): National Portrait Gallery.
- Cameron, J. M., & Ford, C. (1975). The Cameron Collection: an album of photographs. Wokingham: Van Nostrand Reinhold for the National Portrait Gallery.
- Cameron, J. M. P., & Weaver, M. (1986). Whisper of the muse: the Overstone album & other photographs. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum.
- Cameron, J. M. P. (1994). For my best beloved sister, Mia: an album of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron : an exhibition of works from the Hochberg-Mattis collection organized by the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Albuquerque: The Museum.
- Wolf, Sylvia, et al. (1998). Julia Margaret Cameron's women. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.
- Lukitsh, Joanne (2001). Julia Margaret Cameron. London: Phaidon.
- Cox, Julian, and Colin Ford (2003). Julia Margaret Cameron: the complete photographs. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
References
- ^ J. Paul Getty Museum. Julia Margaret Cameron. Retrieved September 13, 2008.
- ^ AskOxford: The Cod and the Camera Quote is taken from her unpublished autobiography, "Annals of My Glass House."
- ^ Victoria and Albert Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron Related Photographers
- ^ 'Christabel,' Mary Emily 'May' Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print on gold-edged cabinet, 1866, sitter in 7 portraits, National Portrait Gallery, npg.org.uk
- ^ Stephen, L. (1886). Dictionary of national biography: vol. VIII. Burton -- Cantwell. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.
- ^ Woolf, V., & Fry, R. E. (1926). Victorian photographs of famous men & women. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
- ^ Gernsheim, H. (1948). Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work. Famous photographers. London: Fountain Press; distributed in the USA by Transatlantic Arts, New York.
- ^ a b Dialogue With Photography by Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper, Thames & Hudson 1979
External links
- Julia Margaret Cameron Trust
- The official National Media Museum print website containing many Julia Margaret Cameron prints
- George Eastman House photography collection - 163 selected images
- Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
- Inventory of the Julia Margaret Cameron Family Papers, ca. 1777-1940, including full names of individuals, their identity, and nicknames used within the correspondence
- "Julia Margaret Cameron - Photographer in Focus". Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
- Julia Margaret Cameron photography as part of 'Victorian Visions' (on loan from V&A Museum) at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Wirral. From December 2007 - March 2008.