In Focus: Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

by Julian Cox

Known as the "greatest pictorialist of her day," Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) came to photography late in life, bringing years of literary and artistic experience to what was still a relatively new medium. She believed the camera was a tool of expression and revolved to reconcile
traditional art content with modern forms of expression. The first volume in the In Focus series to examine the work of a nineteenth-century photographer, this beautiful volume examines Cameron's passion for the "divine art" and her "deeply seated love of the beautiful" that are clearly revealed by
her compelling pictures. The J. Paul Getty Museum's collection of Cameron photographs consists of 298 prints. Approximately fifty of them are presented here. The plates are accompanied by commentaries written by Julian Cox, assistant curator of photographs. Along with Judy Dater, David Featherstone,
Joanne Lukitsch, Weston Naef, Pamela Roberts, and Robert Woof, he participated in a colloquium on Cameron, an edited transcript of which is included here along with a chronology of Cameron's life.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 1996

Reviews

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cameron’s appeal is so strong because her work is dotted with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that are evidence of the living process that bespeaks the most serious and daring art. Julian Cox



Alfred, Lord Tennyson. May 1865 Plate 18 from the book

The Book

This book is one of the IN FOCUS series of books published by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles. In it are presented a collection of almost fifty of the photographs of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

There’s a one page Forward by John Walsh and a four page introduction by Julian Cox. These are followed by the main section of the book, “Plates”. Following the Plates is a 37 page section that I’ll call the Discussion, and following that is a four page chronology of Cameron’s life.

The Plates section has a photograph on the right-hand page, and commentary text on the facing page written by Julian Cox, Assistant Curator in the museum’s Department of Photographs.


Forward/Introduction/Discussion

The Forward notes that this volume of the In Focus series is the first devoted to a nineteenth century artist, and goes on to explain briefly why Cameron “has a logical claim to precedence”. (I found a web site on which Cameron is listed as the 12th most significant photographer of all time.) http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/201...


The Introduction contains a biographical essay on Cameron, information about the Getty Museum Cameron collection, and about the participants in the Discussion.

The Discussion itself is extremely interesting, much more so than I expected. It’s an edited transcript of a 1995 colloquium on Cameron’s life and work which was held at the Getty. In the main part of the review I’ll refer to comments made in this discussion as follows: “Discussion” and the initials of the speaker as given in a spoiler below.


Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Prattle was born in 1815 in Calcutta. Her father was an official of the East India Company; her mother was the daughter of French royalists.

Up to the age of about 20 Cameron, with her mother and siblings, made several trips to Europe. She received most of her education in France.

In 1835 she convalesced from an illness in South Africa, where she met both Sir John Herschel (then in his early 40s) and Charles Hay Cameron, aged about 40. Cameron, whom she wed in Calcutta three years later, was “a distinguished liberal reformer”. His Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful explored issues which much later became important in Cameron’s art.

For the next ten years Cameron was one of the leading hostesses in Calcutta. She helped raise relief funds for the Irish potato famine, and corresponded with Herschel about the latest developments in photography, though she had no camera at this time.

In 1848 her husband retired and the family moved to England. Cameron was 33 and presumably had had some or all of her five children by then. They later adopted a sixth child. It seems impossible to find dates for when her children were born, or even a list of their names in a single place.



Portrait of Julia Cameron by G.F. Watts circa 1850-52

The Camerons first lived in Kent, but within a couple years had moved to London. A decade later, in 1860, while her husband was in Ceylon visiting their sons and surveying the family coffee plantations, Julia visited Alfred, Lord Tennyson at his new home on the Isle of Wight. She was much taken with this locale, and arranged to buy an adjacent property. The Cameron household took up residence there, becoming Tennyson’s neighbors.

In 1863 Julia received a sliding box camera as a Christmas gift from her only daughter and son-in-law, Julia and Charles Norman. She was 48 years old, at “a transitional moment in her life”. Cameron wrote years later that with this opportunity given her, she began “to arrest all beauty that came before me.” Who may have helped her learn the basics needed is uncertain. (There are at least two likely candidates, friends of the family that had some knowledge of the essentials.) She must have been exceedingly eager to learn how to do it. As she wrote, “I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.”

The camera and the process.



Sliding box camera, vintage 1850s

Cameron’s model employed 9x11 inch glass plates in a process that produced “albumen prints”. To produce such a print in the 1860s was not exactly a “point and shoot” process. In the Discussion (p 116) Pamela Roberts explains the technique involved.

She would set up a scene like this and get all the subjects ready, but then she would have to prepare the negative. You couldn’t prepare it in advance and have it in your camera and then get the group set up, because the collodion had to be used when it was still sticky. If it dried, there would be no sensitivity, and you’d take a very bad photograph. So Cameron had to set them up: coat the negative with collodion, a mixture of nitrous cellulose, ether, and alcohol: then dip it into a light-sensitive chemical like silver nitrate: and finally put it in the camera. By the time she had done all that, there was the chance the subjects had moved.

This whole description would apply as well to a portrait, in which the subject would need to hold as still as possible while as the preparation proceeded, in order to hold the precise pose, with light falling in the way Cameron wanted.

(For further description of the process, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albumen_... .)

The Plates

In this section I’ll show several of the plates that the Discussion focuses on; the participants were
DF – David Featherstone (moderator), independent editor and curator who lives in San Francisco.
JC – Julian Cox, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
JD – Judy Dater, photographer based in Palo Alto California.
JL – Joanne Lukitsh, Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art.
PR – Pamela Roberts, Curator of the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England.
RW - Director of the Wordsworth Trust and Centre for British Romanticism is Grasmere, England.
WN – Weston Naef, Curator of Photographs at the Getty Museum.
.

The text under the photographs is taken from the commentary on the photo by Cox, or from the Discussion, unless otherwise noted. Direct quotations are always shown.




Plate 1 “Annie” January 1864

This is the first surviving picture that Julia Cameron took. From the date it’s apparent that in little more than a month she had achieved a result that she thought worthwhile – several surviving prints of the photo are inscribed with the words “my first success”.

The subject of the photo was Annie Philpot, the daughter of a local resident. In the Discussion JL relates that she has seen a copy of the photograph owned by the descendants of the girl, to which is attached a note written by Cameron: “My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best & fairest little sitter. This photograph was taken by me at 1 p.m. Friday Jan. 29th. Printed – Toned – fixed and framed all by me & given as it is now by 8 p.m. this same day.” To which DF opines that her obvious excitement about the picture, the fact that she had it mounted and presented to the child’s father hours after taking it (and note the date and time of day) suggests that a light bulb had gone off for Cameron, that she suddenly had realized what she could achieve with the camera and what it might mean for her.




Plate 2 “Sadness” 1864

This is a study of the seventeen year old Ellen Terry, perhaps the leading Shakespearean actress of the Victorian era. Terry was already a famous actress when she married G.F. Watts in February of 1864, when she was still sixteen. Watts was thirty years her senior. Watts was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Born in 1817, Watts (who was two years younger than Cameron) had painted Cameron’s portrait twelve years before this, in 1852, and had become a close friend of hers. He had also painted Terry’s portrait. The mismatched couple had their honeymoon at Freshwater (where Cameron lived, on the Isle of Wight), and this photo was likely taken at that time. Terry apparently realized soon that the marriage was a mistake, and left Watts for various men more her age. (Part sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Terry )

“Cameron’s uncertain technique is evidenced by the image loss at the lower center of the picture, where the collodion emulsion peeled away from the glass-plate negative.”

From the Discussion:
WN: “Cameron has created an almost deliberately erotic picture but given it a contrary, antipodal title. This is a marriage portrait of a sixteen-year-old girl who has just been turned over to the hands of a forty-seven-year-old man.” Well, she had actually turned herself over by accepting his proposal.
o o o o o o
JC: “She was aiming to generate income from her work, yet she was not a commercially established, studio-based photographer. She worked at a time when there were any number of highly successful commercial portraitists and carte-de-visite artists active. Registering her photographs for copyright was a way to organize her work, contend with the competition, and define her output.” So this photo was of a very famous, popular and beautiful young actress. Cameron surely knew that prints of this could be a revenue source.




Plate 7 “Faith” 1864

“Conceived as part of a series of nine photographs whose title, Fruits of the Spirit, is derived from Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, faith, meekness, temperance …” Cameron was a devout Anglican. This series was her first sustained attempt to address religious subject matter: she exhibited it in Scotland in 1864 and presented the group in the British Museum in January 1865. Later that year it was also included in the Dublin International Exhibition.” The models were Mary Hillier, whom Cameron thought of as a great asset to her photography, a maid in her house; and Elizabeth and Kate Keown.

The discussion:

JL:” … this is arguably a Madonna with John the Baptist and Christ. … Cameron’s repeated use of the Madonna and Child to epitomize these different virtues isn’t remarked upon often enough. This idealization of women could have a religious association or an aesthetic connection to Italian art or could just be a valorization of motherhood.”




Plate 17 “The Whisper of the Muse/Portrait of G.F. Watts” April 1865

G.F. Watts was of course Ellen Terry’s abandoned husband, and also Cameron’s friend and artistic mentor. The child on the left with the “daringly truncated” head and the eyes which engage the viewer and won’t let go, is Elizabeth Keown, one of the child models in the previous photo (but darned if I can decide which one). The name of the “muse” on the right is not known. “This study is remarkable for the sophistication of its surface elements, which are skillfully arranged in a tightly compressed space.”


*** Plate 18 “Alfred Tennyson” 1865

This plate is shown at the top of the review, and is not included in the discussion.

Tennyson was Poet Laureate of England from the death of the previous Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, in 1850 until his own demise in 1892. Tennyson had rented Farringford House on the Isle of Wight in 1853, and bought it in 1856. As already noted, Cameron had visited him there and bought the adjacent property in 1860. She made many portraits of him over the following years. This one became the most famous, since Julia used it as the frontispiece of the first of her illustrated volumes of his Idylls of the King in 1874.

Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater depicted Tennyson hosting Cameron and G.F. Watts at Farringford House.




Plate 25 “J.F.W. Herschel” April 1867

J.W.F. Herschel (1792 – 1871) was chiefly known as an astronomer. He originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy and named several of the moons of Saturn and Uranus. In his own time Herschel was almost as famous an astronomer as his father, whose greatest achievement was the discovery of Neptune in 1781. The younger Herschel also made many important contributions to the development of photography – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Her....

In the discussion, DF comments that this portrait is a “signature style” of Cameron’s, what he calls the “close up heads”. By this time Cameron had a larger camera which employed 12x15 inch glass plates. These plates allowed the print to be basically life-size, which Cameron often noted when she signed her prints (including this one) “from life”. JC points out that Cameron had an intense desire to photograph Hershel , whom she had known for much of her lifetime – she wrote him in 1866 “I often think that I could do a head that would be valuable to all ages, and I long to take your photograph with a longing unspeakable.” Several months later she lugged all her equipment to his home on the mainland, and with the photograph shown above, produced “the last really strong photographic record” of Herschel, who died in 1871.




Plate 26 “Mrs. Herbert Duckworth” April 1867

This intensely beautiful portrait is of Mrs. Herbert Duckwoth (nee Julia Jackson), who was a much sought after model “by leading artists of the day”. She was used as a model for the Virgin by Edward Burne-Jones in his 1879 Annunciation,”one of the great works of Pre-Raphaelite painting.”

(See http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/pi... for a picture of the painting, and commentary on Burne-Jones as a Pre-Rapaelite.)

Jackson had married Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867, at the age of 21. Cameron’s portraits (there are two) were probably made just prior to the wedding. Duckworth was widowed in 1870, and a few years later married the widower of Minnie Thackeray, Leslie Stephen. In 1882 their third child, Adelaine Virgina, was born. In 1912 Adelaine married the writer Leonard Woolf and hence became known to us as Virgina Woolf. (Did you follow all that?)

The discussion about this plate includes remarks by JR (“ … this is a photograph that men fall in love with – they want her. She’s aloof and untouchable but so beautiful and perfect”, and by JC (“She was also Cameron’s godchild … It is an iconic image of both womanhood and coming-of-age … after 1870 she was very active in social reform work … a very busy, energetic, intelligent person.”)

So. One of Cameron’s many photographs of her niece and godchild - Virginia Woolf’s mother.




Plate 44 “Charles Norman and His Daughters Adeline and Margaret” July 1874

In 1873 Cameron lost her daughter Julia Norman who, at age thirty-four

already a mother of six (like Cameron) … went the way of Minnie Thackeray and countless other women of the period and died in childbirth.
Because her looks were not considered fine enough, Norman was seldom a subject for her mother’s camera, a bitter irony in view of the fact that it was her gift of a camera that had been the catalyst for Cameron’s remarkable career in photography. Cameron’s grief at her death is expressed in a moving series of portraits that she made of the Norman family in the summer of 1874.

The discussion includes a number of very tender comments about Cameron’s granddaughters in the photo, including JL’s: “It’s a double loss for them, because they’ve lost their childhood as well as their mother.”

Family was the cornerstone of Cameron's art and life. This and other photographs of the Normans represent a bonding among the remaining family. Making the series may have helped Cameron cope with her sense of loss. It was Charles and Julia Norman's gift of a camera that became the catalyst for her photography. Cameron later wrote in her annals: "My first lens was given to me by my cherished departed daughter and her husband, with the words, 'It may amuse you Mother, to try to photograph.' " (From the Getty web site.)

In fact the Camerons had fallen on hard times in the early 1870s, and in October of 1875 left England for Ceylon, where they lived near their coffee-farming sons. This was the beginning of the end of Julia Cameron’s photographic career. She took some pictures in Ceylon over the next few years, mostly of maidservants, plantation workers, and members of the family. But “she no longer had an audience or market for her work and therefore could hardly justify the expense of materials.” In 1879 she and her husband made a short visit to England. The next January Julia died after a short illness; her husband died in 1881. They are buried together on the grounds of St. Mary’s Church, near Glancairn, Ceylon.

Assessment

Unfortunately, there appears to be no definitive biography of Cameron. Frankly, this IN FOCUS offering may be as good as anything available. In her Wiki article there are two items that look promising (1) Cameron, J. M. P. (1889). Unfinished autobiography "Annals of my glass house" by Julia Margaret Cameron, written 1874, first published 1889 and (2) Lukitsh, Joanne (2001). Julia Margaret Cameron. London: Phaidon. The first is quite short but probably worthwhile, the second is an appreciation much like the reviewed book – photos & commentaries.

The view which the reviewed book presents is wide. It is not only a portrait of an artist (and her photographic portraits), nor does a “slice of the history of photography” exhaust its appeal. It is too a window into the Victorian age – its attitudes to symbolism, religion, family, women. Not definitive by any means, but tantalizing, suggestive. I appreciated the trails it sent me down to find out more about the people of that age.

But the photos themselves are the main attraction. Here’s a note I wrote in the margin about half way through the Plates. “Slowly reading through the volume and gazing at one photo after another, one does come under a spell.”

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pioneer, not just of photography but for art and women - this is a lovely book, with wonderful reproductions of classic early photography. She's important and influential, and there are some incredibly famous people captured in her portraits.

[Sina Soltani]

First book I managed to get my hands on covering some of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work and this only the beginning of an exciting path to see and read more. I’m not one for throwing the word “timeless” around easily because every visual medium specifically that of photography deals directly with time. A photograph is the suspension of a moment in time and therefore every photograph at the moment of its creation becomes history as Roland Barthes put it. JMC’s photography seems to almost defy this rule about photography had it not been for the obviously nineteenth century process she had available. Her portraits at the same time resemble works of Velazquez and contemporary modern portraitists. I am in love with her work and her artistic style and that is saying a lot coming from someone living in the twenty first century world of saturated images and moving pictures.

[andrea]

focused on a photo each morning, with the accompanying text, which included excellent historical insight and it wasn't a bad way to start the day, pioneer that julia maragaret cameron was.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful little book of the photos of Julia Margret Cameron.