Cupid's Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography

Abstract

When one thinks of Victorian images of come-hither children, it is Lewis Carroll that one probably thinks of first, but in fact it is Julia Margaret Cameron, the good mother and grandmother, who has left us with the more obsessive, the more insistent, and I think the more perverse record of a fascination with the allure of childish bodies. (Just one example would be Cameron's Infant Undine of 1864, with that pseudononchalant, crossed-foot pose, that slightly sullen, almost sultry look, that sliding slip, and its revelation of plumped baby flesh, recalled in contemporary images, such as Sally Mann's snapshotty yet Hollywoodish photograph of her daughter, Virginia at 3, which verge on child pornography, so people felt at the time of their exhibition.)' In fact, the image of the child was central to Cameron's practice right from the beginning, when she took up her camera in 1864 at the matriarchal age of forty-nine and recorded a village girl, Annie Philpot, as her first success in photography. Right from the start, the eroticized child was a mainstay--indeed, it is to 1864 that a good share of such pictures are dated (it is the year of The Infant Undine, The Double Star, and The Infant Bridal, for instance).