Julia Margaret Cameron: Perfection Is Not Everything
Initially, Julia Margaret Cameron's career did not strike me as particularly interesting. "Another story of a well-off family," I thought. After spending her entire life in India, Cameron retired to England in 1848 and then moved to the Isle of Wight in 1860. Surrounded by high-society neighbors, she began photographing them and even had them sign the photos to make them more appealing to art galleries. Her husband oversaw a coffee plantation. Her personal maid was often involved in the shoots, and there are accounts of Cameron amusing herself at the expense of her "victims", as some called them.
What could be interesting about such a person?
Julia began photographing only at the age of 48, after 1863, when her daughter gifted her a camera to occupy her solitude after her six children had grown up and left home, and her husband was busy overseas with work. Cameron used a chicken coop as her photography studio and a coal shed as her darkroom. She never had commercial interests and never took commissioned portraits, instead involving friends, family, and household staff in her activities.
Being well-connected within the circle of artists, writers, and luminaries of London society, who were often her guests, her portraits include those of Charles Darwin, the poet Tennyson, and the philosopher Thomas Carlyle.
Cameron greatly admired her guests, and in her photos, she portrayed them as heroes or legendary sovereigns, imbuing these scenes with a mystical aura.
The women portrayed by Cameron posed as characters from the myths and popular legends of the Victorian era. Among the subjects is Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice.
Studio portraits were already very popular in England at the time, but Cameron found them rather banal and uninspiring. She wanted more than just a simple portrayal of reality for her shots, combining form with the ideal without sacrificing truth. Julia Margaret Cameron became known among London society photographers, who ridiculed her images for their overly soft use of focus, granting her only the quality of being very original and nothing else. Her out-of-focus shots made the contours softer and the images not too clear and sharp. The photos have a deliberately dreamy style, aiming to convey the genius of men and the beauty of women in a specifically Christian, sublime, and sacred framework, or inspired by Shakespearean and Elizabethan characters.
In response to criticism of her focusing errors, Cameron said, "What is focus, and who decide when it’s right?". Her friends understood that the photographer's vision was not driven by the search for accuracy but rather by something else, and they continued to support her stylistic choices.
Julia consciously discarded the formal poses of the era's portraits and the elaborate narratives of photographers of her time, such as
H. P. Robinson
O. G. Rejlander
including imperfections in her prints, such as scratches, smudges, and sometimes even fingerprints, which other photographers would have considered technical errors. For this reason, she is today considered ahead of her time. However, we do not know if these were intentional elements or simply accepted by the photographer, but we do know that she sometimes deliberately manipulated the images to make corrections or create collages.
Fifty years after her death, Cameron's photographs were reorganized and presented in her first photographic book by her great-niece Virginia Woolf, allowing her work to be rediscovered by subsequent generations of photographers.
