Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was one of the most important portrait photographers of the 19th century. She received her first camera when she was 48 years old, and spent the next decade of her life feverishly producing dreamy portraits.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was one of the most important portrait photographers of the 19th century. She received her first camera when she was 48 years old, and spent the next decade of her life feverishly producing dreamy portraits.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we're highlighting women who've led dynamic lives. Ones that have shifted, evolved and bloomed, often later in life.
Today’s Womanican is credited with producing the first photographic close-ups. She received her first camera when she was 48 years old, and spent the next decade of her life feverishly producing dreamy portraits that became synonymous with her name: Julia Margaret Cameron.
She was born Julia Margaret Pattle on June 11, 1815 as a child of the English empire in India. Her father worked for the East India Company and her mother was a French aristocrat.
Julia had six sisters who remained close throughout their lives – so much so that their bond was dubbed the “Pattledom.” Though the Pattledom grew up in Kolkata, India, they also spent time in France and South Africa.
While she was living in South Africa in her early 20s, Julia met Charles Hay Cameron. He was a legal scholar, twenty years her senior, and looked a bit like Merlin the Wizard – aglow in long white hair and a scraggly long white beard.
They married in Kolkata in 1838. Julia raised a total of 11 children – five were her own, five were the children of relatives, and another was an adopted orphaned girl. In 1845 the family moved to England, where Julia’s creative life bloomed.
Julia started writing poetry, and even started a novel. Meanwhile her husband Charles invested in coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. In 1863, they were living in a town called Freshwater on The Isle of Wight, an island off the southern coast of England known for its jagged white cliffs.
While Charles was in Ceylon tending to one of his plantations, Julia’s daughter gave her a gift intended to keep her busy in her solitude.
She wrote to her mother: “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater."
This new object, a sliding-box camera, took over her life.
In her unfinished memoir, Annals of my Glasshouse, Julie described the intensity with which she took to her new calling:
She went to the old chicken coop out back in a frenzy and liberated all of the hens. When she brought in the camera she didn’t know where or how to place it. When she began taking photographs she didn’t know what to tell her subject, and at one point blurred out one of the slides by rubbing her hand over the filmy side of the glass.
Regardless of her amateur mistakes, Julia threw herself into learning and wrangled every person who came to visit into her studio. Even if they refused – Julia insisted.
Sometimes she asked them to dress for their portraits – as figures from mythology, Chrisitan tales, and literature. In order to expose their image well, Julia had them sit in their poses for very long periods of time.
Soon the society of hens and chickens was replaced by that of her many subjects: “poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm” coop.
Within the year she had taken the first image she was proud of.
She developed an unmistakable style: they were close-up, slightly out-of-focus images that gave her subjects a dreamy quality.
Julia copyrighted, marketed, and sold her images and fought for them to be seen the way she did: as high art. But her contemporaries didn’t take her seriously and if anything chalked her style up to imprecision, rather than talent.
Julia didn’t care. She took to her work with as much zeal and enthusiasm as ever. Anthony Lane, from the New Yorker, wrote: “she conducted herself as if wishing to prove, to the relevant authorities, that a single lifetime was an insultingly brief span, in the light of all that needed and begged to be achieved.”
Julia did achieve some recognition and financial success in her lifetime. She held exhibits, was featured in galleries, and became a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland.
But in 1873 the family moved to Ceylon, and though Julia took some photographs in her later years, the most prolific period of her life came to an end. In her 12-year career, she had produced almost 1,000 photographs.
A friend of hers later wrote about how empty the Cameron home felt in Freshwater once they left:
“All its old feverish life and bustle are stilled, as is the heart which beat here in true sympathy with every living creature that came within its reach [...] Her pretty maids, her scholars, her poets, her philosophers, astronomers, and divines, all those men of genius who came and sat willingly to her while in a fever of artistic emotion [...] — they have all gone, and silence is the only tenant left.”
Julia became sick and died in Ceylon on January 26, 1879. She was 64 years old.
All month, we’re highlighting the stories of lifelong learners. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!