Artist Info
Julia Margaret Cameron
The daughter of an officer in the East India Company, Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815. Educated in France, Cameron returned to India where she married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist in Calcutta in 1838. They had five children together, and also raised five young relations and an Irish girl called Mary Ryan whom Cameron adopted and used as a frequent photographic model. The family moved to London in 1848 and later settled on the Isle of Wight.
After receiving a camera as a gift in 1863, Cameron converted a chicken coop into a studio and a coal bin into a darkroom and began making portraits. Among her sitters were her friends the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, the writer Thomas Carlyle, and the scientist Charles Darwin. Especially noteworthy from this period are her sensitive renderings of female beauty, as in her portraits of the actress Ellen Terry, her niece Julia Jackson and Mary Ryan.
Like many Victorian photographers, Cameron made allegorical and illustrative studio photographs, posing and costuming family members and servants in imitation of the popular Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the day. Cameron was often criticized by the photographic establishment of her day for her supposedly poor technique: some of her pictures are out of focus, her plates are sometimes cracked, and her fingerprints are often visible. Later critics appreciated her valuing of spiritual depth over technical perfection. In 1875 Cameron and her husband returned to their coffee plantation in Ceylon where she died four years later.
