Maud by Julia Margaret Cameron
“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.”
Julia Margaret Cameron – 1815-1879 – is known as a Victorian era portrait photographer. She was given her first camera at the age of 48, a Christmas gift from her daughter and son in law at a time when her nest of husband and six children was fairly empty. Her son in law thought the contraption might amuse her during her times alone or away at the country house in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of Southern England.
Julia had no shortage of subjects as she was connected to writers, poets, artists, and people of science – the celebrities of her day. She was socially connected to the likes of Browning, Tennyson, and Darwin. Lord Tennyson was her neighbor at Freshwater.
Like many photographers that came after her, she did not want to open a commercial studio, rather, she enjoyed making portraits and studies with the people she knew, and acquaintances that she made. When she was given the camera, she had no idea where it was going to take her. She knew nothing about photography or the art she could create with it.
“I began with no knowledge of the art,” she wrote. “I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.”
She was heavily criticized by her contemporary photographers for her out of focus portraits, smudged glass negatives, and technical inability, but it was all part of her learning process. As she learned about photography and made portraits, she began copyrighting and marketing her work. She herself sold a number of images to the Victoria and Albert Museum and contracted a publisher to sell prints of her work. She was praised more by the artists of her time, who recognized the beauty in her work.
Charles Darwin, C.1870 by Julia Margaret Cameron
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