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Julia Margaret Cameron - women photographers

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Ranked #7,144 in Arts & Design, #120,382 overall

Greatest portrait photography ever produced.

Julia Margaret Cameron left her indelible mark on the richly layered world of Victorian England. Born in Calcutta, she married a senior British bureaucrat, bore six children, and went to live in England in 1848. Her children had all departed the family home and she was approaching fifty -elderly for a Victorian woman - when she was given the gift of a camera by her daughter with the endearing message "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Fresh Water."

And amuse Julia Margaret Cameron it did. Photography became the consuming passion of her life, and, by her own description, she handled her lens "with a tender ardor." She photographed her family and she photographed her friends, many of them the "eminent Victorians" of their day: Thomas Carlyle, Sir John Herschel, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, and the poet laureate of England, Alfred Lord Tennyson. "When I have such men before my camera," she wrote, "my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man."

The redoubtable Mrs. Cameron was not easily stopped by anything

Mrs. Cameron worshiped beauty, and one of her favorite models was her niece Julia, undoubtedly named in honor of her eccentric aunt, and by any standard a great beauty. The niece married twice, first to Herbert Duckworth, who died leaving her with three children. In 1878, she married Sir Leslie Stephen and produced four more children. Her youngest daughter would be celebrated as one of England's greatest writers, Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Cameron was a pioneer in demonstrating that women-even nineteenth-century women, hampered by hoopskirts and Victorian perceptions of propriety - could master the challenge of photography if they were not deterred by its cumbersome equipment, by the unladylike fumes that clung to their hair, or by the nasty chemical stains that tarnished their fingers. The redoubtable Mrs. Cameron was not easily stopped by anything. Sixty-five years before her illustrious great-niece, Virginia, published a witty essay vividly explaining to women the importance of having "a room of one's own," Julia Margaret Cameron decreed that freedom was a photographic room of one's own. She energetically converted a chicken coop into a studio and an unused coal house into a darkroom.

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She inspired generations of women to break the silken bonds of a restrictive femininity

Julia Margaret Cameron's bequest to Virginia Woolf was manifold: the vibrant example of her free spirit, her independence, her desire to see beneath the surface of things. And she left Virginia an album of exquisite photographs of her mother, whose death when Virginia was thirteen years old permanently clouded her life. The description of the beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in her novel To the Lighthouse is based on Virginia Woolf's remembrance of her mother, no doubt refreshed by her great-aunt's enduring portraits, including this one which captures a woman of extraordinary radiance and grace.
Julia Margaret Cameron's legacy benefited not only her family and heirs. She inspired generations of women to break the silken bonds of a restrictive femininity, to pick up a camera and to record the world around them. Today, Mrs. Cameron's work is acclaimed as among the greatest portrait photography ever produced. For the many women photographers who have traveled the path she cleared for them, we can only guess at the magnitude of their indebtedness to this indefatigable Victorian lady.