Creating a new genre

Julia Margaret Cameron

(1815–1879)

British Photographer

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“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.”

In the mid-1800s, photography was still in its infancy but like most of Victorian Britain it was overwhelmingly male dominated. Women were thought to be too demure and dainty to handle the large camera equipment or to be exposed to the dangerous chemicals.

In 1845, they moved to London eventually settling on the Isle of Wight, a popular location for Britain’s cultural elite where Julia became the eccentric friend of Victorian England’s poets, writers, historians and scientists that included Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle and John Herschel.

In 1863, her grown daughter gave Cameron a camera with a note: “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.”[1] (Her husband had recently left on a business trip to visit their coffee plantation in Sri Lanka.) Cameron immediately converted a chicken coop into her studio and a coal bin into her darkroom to begin experimenting with the newest technique of wet collodion processing.

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She started taking portraits of her famous neighbours and friends: the writers, the poets, historians, artists, thinkers and  scientists. But she also used local people as well as her family and servants for her models in her allegorical tableau vivants that copied mythology, classic painters and religious stories.