Julia Margaret Cameron was ahead of her time: She not only celebrated great success as a photographic artist as housewife and mother, but she also succeeded in bringing new life to long-lost figures from history, fairytales, and myths with dreamy images.
(...) Continue readingJulia Margaret Cameron discovered photography later in life
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta on 11 June 1815, a circumstance he owed to her father’s position as an executive with the East India Company, although spent her youth at her grandmother’s in Versailles. She only arrived at photography when she was already a wife and mother when her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera in December 1863 to occupy her time in her secluded home in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight. Cameron was already aged 48, the mother of six children, deeply religious and very well read. She also associated with some of England’s most outstanding thinkers, including the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Taylor and Robert Browning. Whilst her husband, the lawyer Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior, looked after the coffee plantations and the children were in school, Cameron had plenty of spare time to devote herself to her new passion.
Family, friends and servants became legendary figures
With photography, Julia Margaret Cameron discovered a new world. It not only provided something to connect her to the many notable personalities who spent they holiday on the Isle of Wight, but she also developed a flair for completely novel pictorial compositions. The family estate of Dimbola Lodge became the hub of society; visited by the great and small of society, the artist’s hospitable and motherly nature was appreciated by everyone. Cameron therefore had no shortage of models, whom she no longer simply portrayed, but conducted into ever new roles from history, literature and legend. She thus staged Guinevere’s parting from Lancelot and other motifs from Tennyson’s epic cycle of poems Idylls of the King. In her enthusiasm, Cameron sometimes went so far that Tennyson, who was also involved, jokingly dubbed the deplorable models as victims. If her family and friends escaped in time, the maid was unceremoniously relieved from housework and made to pose for hours as the Virgin Mary.
With many improvisations to romantic-dreamy picture worlds
Julia Margaret Cameron benefited in her artistic work from her high level of education which she owed first and foremost to her erudition. She struggled more with the technical difficulties posed by the still young and undeveloped medium of photography, and the first judgements of her craftsmanship were accordingly critical, although her choice of motifs was met with great acclaim early on. Cameron did not give up and acquired all the knowledge she needed with much effort and diligence. Her efforts were supported by her family: Her husband not only willingly posed as the wizard Merlin but was also the first to examine each new picture, and his enthusiastic approval encouraged the artist to continue her work. The children, in turn, gave up their morning egg when the chicken coop was turned into the studio, and the coal cellar became the darkroom. It was simply her aim to capture everything beautiful she encountered with the camera, Cameron stated in her posthumously published autobiography. Certainly an understatement – for much of the beauty and mystery that her pictures show only came about through the creative power of an extraordinary artist.
Julia Margaret Cameron died on 26 January 1879 in Kalutara, formerly Ceylon, today Sri Lanka. The writer Virginia Woolf was her great-niece.
Julia Margaret Cameron - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
