Julia Margaret Cameron
“I write to ask you if you will… exhibit at the South Kensington Museum a set of prints of my late series of photographs that I intend should electrify you with delight and startle the world” – Julia Margaret Cameron to Henry Cole, 21 February 1866.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) celebrates the bicentenary of iconic photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s (1815-1879) birth with a retrospective exhibition of her work.
Being among the most important and inventive photographers of the 19th century, Cameron is also one of the most celebrated women in photographic history. Her photographs were highly innovative of their time, intentionally out of focus, and often including scratches, smudges and other traces of her work process. During her lifetime, she was criticised for her unconventional techniques, but also appreciated for the beauty of her compositions and her conviction that photography was an art form.
Cameron’s career began when she received her first camera at the age of 48, as a gift from her daughter. Devoting herself passionately to the art of photography, Cameron sold and gave her works to the South Kensington Museum, the current V&A, within only two years. In 1868 the Museum granted her the use of two rooms as a portrait studio, likely making her the Museum’s first artist in residence.
A hundred and fifty years after her first exhibition, the V&A presents the highlights of Cameron’s works with more than 100 photographs, including original prints acquired directly from the artist. Through a selection of letters, the exhibition explores Cameron’s relationship with the Museum’s Founding Director, Sir Henry Cole, who in 1865 presented Cameron’s first museum exhibition, and the only one during her lifetime. Cole’s diary from 1865, which accounts him going to Cameron to have his portrait “photographed in her style” will also be on view along with the only remaining portrait of Cole by Cameron.
Best known for her powerful portraits, Cameron posed her subjects including friends, family and servants, as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. The exhibition will showcase a variety of these categorised in subjects that Cameron described as Portraits, Madonna Groups, and Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect. This selection range from Annie, a close-up of a child’s face, which Cameron called her first success, to striking portraits of members of Cameron’s intellectual and artistic circle such as poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, scientist Charles Darwin and Julia Jackson, Cameron’s niece and mother of writer Virginia Woolf. Further the exhibition will display a range of Renaissance-inspired religious arrangements and illustrations to Tennyson’s epic Arthurian poem, Idylls of the King.
Julia Margaret Cameron will be structured around four letters from Cameron to Cole, each reflecting a certain aspect of her development as an artist: Her early ambition, her growing artistic confidence and innovation, her concerns as a portraitist and desire to earn money from photography, and her struggles with technical aspects of photography.
The exhibition will be on display from Saturday 28 November 2015 – Sunday 21 February 2016 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.
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