Best known for her powerful portraits, Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. Cameron helped prove that portrait photography was indeed a veritable fine art medium in a context where photography was not yet widely accepted as such.
When Julia Margaret Cameron began taking pictures in the 1860s, photography was largely defined by formal commercial studio portraits, elaborate high art narratives, or clinical scientific or documentary renderings. Cameron, on the other hand, forged her own path as a thoughtful and experimental portrait artist who happened to use a camera instead of paint.
–Annie by Julia Margaret Cameron
Cameron didn’t take her first photograph until age 48. The camera gave Cameron something to do as all her children were grown and her husband was often away on business. From that moment on, Cameron dedicated herself to mastering the difficult tasks of processing negatives and focusing on subjects in order to capture beauty.
Cameron considered her 1864 portrait of Annie Philpot to be her first successful work of art.
She wasted no time in marketing, exhibiting, and publishing her artistic photographs, and it wasn’t long before she was successfully exhibiting and selling prints of her photographs in London and abroad.
She proved that portrait photography was a true art form, she described her unique goal as an artist in her unfinished memoir.
I have chose to study Julia Margaret Cameron as her work has the same theme as mine. She has the theme of girlhood in her portraits, representing womanhood and motherhood.
Cameron presents Girlhood in a slightly different way to my work as her work doesn’t particularly portray the feeling of being free, but more representing the meaning of female figures in her time.