Abstract
The traditional view of the nineteenth-century portrait and genre photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79) is that she was an eccentric amateur — a kind of photographic ‘Sunday painter’. Elsewhere in this issue, Kirsten Hoving offers a fascinating diagnosis of Cameron's eccentricity, while I sincerely hope that the newly published catalogue raisonné of her work, which more than doubles the number of her known pictures, demonstrates that she was far from being a hit-and-miss amateur.1 Amateurs, however serious, can often be said to play with their chosen medium, are liable to fail as often as they succeed, and have no interest in making money from it. Cameron, by contrast, worked carefully, deliberately and knowledgeably towards her most accomplished results — usually the thoughtful culmination of a sequence of pictures, ideas and experiments — and she very much hoped to make money from them, usually in vain.
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