Julia Margaret Cameron's Women

by Sylvia Wolf, Stephanie Lipscomb (Contributor), Debra N. Mancoff (Contributor)

Profiles the life and work of a nineteenth century pioneer of photography and offers a selection of her portraits of women

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction

244 pages, Hardcover

First published September 29, 1998

Reviews

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Victorian but haunting and beautiful. The photos are preraphaelite in style but have a more ‘real’ quality perhaps. Cameron was Virginia Woolf’s great aunt, the photo on the cover is her mother and was a favourite model of Cameron’s. Tennyson was a neighbour on the Isle of Wight. Other models include Alice Liddell, Mary Spartali the painter.

[Kaethe · Rating 4 out of 5]

More interesting to me as history than as art: the posed and costumed portraits weren't my cuppa. But I loved the history of photography, and Cameron's biography. And I really, really loved the section at the end giving detail on the models.

I did particularly like one titled "Pomona" one of the few with the model looking straight-ahead into the camera. There's a kind of defiant lack of prettiness that Kahlo used in many of her self-portraits.

Worthwhile, but not especially entertaining. This is what comes of reading author's notes at the end of historical fiction.

Library copy

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I splurged many years ago and bought this hardback book for myself as a birthday present...It stays on my coffee table and never fails to elicit curiosity and intrigue from visitors..Cameron was perhaps the most original, natural, creative and remarkable photographer of the 19th century...Her style was revolutionary, focusing her subjects in natural lifelike poses in gardens, benches, kitchens and bedrooms that are almost eerily contemporary as we look at them today...She lived her later years on the seaside retreat of the Isle of Wight, where her neighbors were Alfred Lord Tennyson and Alice Liddle, who was the muse for Carroll's children's book, Alice in Wonderland...She used her family , maids and friends as subject matter and her work coveys an uncanny freshness about it...Like many women artists and photographers, she was self taught, practiced her craft for self amusement and received a camera as a gift in the early 1860s..She is not widely known outside photography buff circles because of this..But to those who discover her, it is truly a gift for the heart and mind.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, expansive and so important

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book - gorgeous photos and well written.

[Miggsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning collection of Julia Margaret Cameron's hauntingly beautiful photography. Sylvia Wolf is both reverent and critical, her essays providing interesting backstories of some of her female models, whose backgrounds varied drastically from each other. Among the most notable of among her sitters was Julia Jackson, her favorite niece and mother of writer Virginia Woolf. Another is Alice Liddell, who as a child served as the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

[Sarah Ryburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

i bought this in the museum shop of the art institute of chicago where i saw an exhibition of her photography. i was amazed by her photographs, by their symbolism and allegory- they were like great writing in a still-print, visual form. i think that exhibit did much to ignite my passion for this art form.

[Ron Stafford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful look at the history of photography, but more than the photography of a wonderful artist. Julia Margaret Cameron's work is stunning. Done in the last years of the 19th and first years of the 20th century, her work is fresh and moving.

[Maryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A feast for the eyes and an opening to the soul. This collection of photographs of women by Cameron is penetratingly beautiful.