Julia Margaret Cameron From the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This exhibition of photographs from an important English photographer continued the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s revisiting of the history of photography, following from ‘The Photograph and Australia’ in June 2015.
The Victorian era was at once a time of remarkable innovation and of stultifying convention. The story of Julia Margaret Cameron, how she came to photography and became a founding figure of the medium, is a very Victorian one, indelibly stained by the prejudices concerning class and sex, and the real-world opportunities and constraints that shaped the world of taste and culture at the time.
A mother of six in her late forties when she first took up photography seriously, Cameron specialised in a style of photographing which was ahead of her time. She explored the representation of pathos and other affects through the lens, while others were still stuck on the ability of the photograph to record a likeness. Her soft-focus pensive portraits of faces made it possible to imagine the photograph as adding something more to portraiture than mere likeness, and something uniquely photographic.
Through her high contrast lighting and careful posing of her subjects, she was able to make pictures that captured an uncanny sense of character and personality. Cameron produced an effect of intimacy between subject and viewer, perhaps in the greater informality of the photograph over the painting, and perhaps also because she mostly photographed people she knew and loved, which allowed something of that familiarity to enter the frame.
Her 1867 portrait of Julia Jackson, her niece and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, is one of the best. It captures a tangible sense of the woman’s gaze—‘as we might imagine