From life: Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian photography

Abstract

Acknowledged as the outstanding portrait photographer of her generation, Julia Margaret Cameron was a very late starter. She was born to English and French parents in Calcutta in 1815, five days before the Battle of Waterloo. Her father was a high-ranking civil servant in the British East India Company, and it was expected that Julia would follow the example of her sisters by connecting herself to an established Anglo-Indian professional. She did exactly that in 1838 when she married Charles Hay Cameron, a legal scholar, and settled down to the quiet life of a typical Victorian colonial matron. But beneath this conventional exterior, Cameron was becoming increasingly interested in photography, and particularly in new technologies that would allow photographic images to be reproduced and preserved in a permanent form. Shortly after her marriage, she began a long and affectionate correspondence with Sir John Herschel, the world-renowned scientist, and he took great delight in keeping her informed about new developments in photography. Herschel and Cameron believed that in the medium of photography, science and art had become one. In 1863, at the advanced age of 48, Julia Margaret Cameron began to emerge as the leading portrait photographer of the day. At a time when photography's status as an artistic form was the subject of fierce debate, she championed the merits of the medium by producing a series of large, striking portraits of distinguished Victorians including Tennyson, Carlyle and Darwin. These pictures, many of which are reproduced in this book, vividly convey a sense of the powerful personalities Cameron chose as models.