More than two centuries after her birth, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is trendy. The appeal of her photography rests on her scornful disregard of rules, an attitude that colored all aspects of her life. As the daughter of a close friend recalled in a memoir, the artist was not merely unrestrained by “normal boundaries”: She was “unconscious of their very existence.”
Her portraits have long been critically acclaimed. But “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron,” a richly evocative touring exhibition of 77 prints presented at the Morgan Library & Museum by the curators Joel Smith and Allison Pappas, and organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, gives equal attention to her staged tableaus, pictures that in later years were derided as dated and sentimental Victoriana. Tastes change, however. As recent exhibitions by Stan Douglas and Tyler Mitchell demonstrated, posed photographs with historical or literary allusions are in fashion, and Cameron’s re-creations of Prospero and Miranda, or of Esther before King Ahasuerus, no longer carry so musty an odor.
Highlighting Cameron’s currency, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year paired her photographs with those of Francesca Woodman, who died by suicide at 22 in the East Village in 1981. Both artists overlooked, even encouraged, technical imperfections, and photographed young women in poses that could be confrontational, seductive or off-kilter. Also, like Cameron, Woodman staged costumed group portraits that would have disgusted the early critical commissars of modernism.
For me, Cameron’s great achievement remains her portraits, especially those of the women who belonged to her family or domestic household and the male eminences she knew well. Raised in Calcutta by a father who worked for the East India Company and a mother of French aristocratic lineage, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a distinguished British civil servant 20 years her senior.
When they relocated from India to England in 1848, eventually settling on the Isle of Wight, their circle included many of the Victorian men she regarded as heroic and photographed that way: among them, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson. “When I have had such men before my camera,” she wrote, “my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.” She inscribed on a print of a Carlyle portrait that he was “like a rough block of Michelangelo’s sculpture.”
In its infancy, photography sought recognition as an art, and the clearest path was through comparison to revered painters. Titles of Cameron’s photographs allude to Giotto, Perugino and Raphael. Her adaptations of their costumes and lighting succeed when the chiaroscuro contrasts and highlighted details create a forceful and theatrical presence. She had a knack for capturing hair and especially beards (the one extending from the chin of Henry Taylor in her 1865 portrait is a world in itself).
At 48, a month after receiving her first camera, Cameron proclaimed her “first success,” which she attributed to “the docility and sweetness” of the subject, little Annie Philpot. Already the hallmarks of Cameron’s style were evident. She positioned the camera very close, so that Annie’s face dominates the frame. The light source on the right accentuates the roundness of Annie’s left cheek, lending it a sculptural quality. The shallow depth of field leaves the background hazy. Even Annie’s face is in soft focus, violating the conventions of studio photography, which called for evenly lit details of clothing and facial features.
Because Cameron’s photographs were something entirely different, they were roundly disparaged. “In these pictures, all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the art are prominently exhibited,” read one review in 1865. As can be frequently seen in the exhibition, the liquid emulsions she applied to the glass-plate negatives might be streaked or speckled. The plates themselves sometimes cracked. Her prints incorporated blurs, scratches and fingerprints. These “mistakes” bothered her not a bit.
A devout Christian, she often rendered religious subjects. One of her three maids, Mary Hillier, was her favored model for the Madonna, and there was a steady supply of children — her own (she had six), her nieces and nephews, young visitors or fishermen’s kids from the island — to pose as angels or holy infants.
The children are featured in sentimental pictures that feel dated and treacly today. One of the better ones, which she termed “a triumph!,” is called “The Whisper of the Muse.” In it, she posed the artist G.F. Watts (a close friend and mentor) holding not a paintbrush but a violin, and she flanked him with two young girls. The tension of the composition counters the tranquillity of Watts’s facial expression and physical manner.
In portraiture, allusions to paintings deepened her art even more. In April 1867, she took four pictures of Sir John Herschel, a brilliant polymath, posing him against a dark backdrop and draping him in shadowed fabric, so that nothing distracts our attention from his head. . You see the wild mane of his coiffure, the lines in his forehead, the grandeur of his nose and the melancholy resoluteness of his eyes and mouth.
No one had ever made such photographs before. The nearest prototype is a 1659 Rembrandt self-portrait, in which the artist’s face is brightly lit in an otherwise dark canvas. Indeed, in the best-known of Cameron’s renditions (not in the show), Herschel is wearing a very similar cap to Rembrandt’s, with unruly hair poking out. (Cameron had asked him to wash and not comb his hair.)
When choosing male subjects, Cameron desired genius, but in photographing women she sought beauty. Often she found a sensuality absent in her men. One portrait, “The Mountain Nymph: Sweet Liberty,” has a bracing informality (the model’s hair is down) and projects the force of the woman’s unflinching gaze.
Cameron’s most beloved sitter was her niece Julia Jackson. At 21, Julia was engaged to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth, and Cameron photographed her in profile. Her swan neck, straight nose and rounded chin are suitable for a cameo. Three years later, Herbert died, leaving Julia with two children and pregnant with a third. She fell into a deep depression. In a blurry portrait Cameron made outdoors four years after Herbert’s death, Julia sits with her little son George, a niece and a nephew, staring vacantly. Cameron later wrote that the bereft widow was praying for death.
Jackson married again, to Leslie Stephen, and with him had four more children, including Virginia Woolf, who was 3 when Cameron died. Woolf recognized in Cameron a kindred soul who found an art form that suited her individuality. Of her, she wrote: “All her sensibility was expressed, and what was perhaps more to the purpose, controlled in the new born art.”
In October 1875, the Camerons relocated to South Asia, this time to Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), where Charles owned coffee plantations. In the last three years of her life, Julia made fewer than 30 photographs that survive, two in this show.
On Jan. 26, 1879, after a brief illness, she died. A story often told, notably by Woolf, relates that as Cameron lay dying, she looked out at the night sky and uttered her final word: “Beautiful.” Along with greatness, it is the quality she had been seeking throughout her life, and one that, with remarkable success, she found, captured and immortalized.
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
Through Sept. 14 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.
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