JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879) was born in Kolkata (Calcutta) and died in Sri Lanka. When her husband retired from the Indian civil service, she and her family bought a house on the Isle of Wight, close to that of her friend, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. From an early age, when she met the astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel in Cape Town, she developed an interest in the relatively young technique of photography. It was only in 1863 when she was residing on the Isle of Wight that she was given her first camera. This was the start of her remarkable career as a photographer. Unlike many other photographers during the Victorian era, Julia was not interested in producing exact images of her subjects in her photographs. Instead, she experimented with lighting, focus, development, and printing, to produce photographic images that were artistic rather than accurate representations of reality. Her subjects included many of the cultural giants of mid to late Victorian Britain. Also, she loved to pose her subjects, dressed in imaginative fancy dress costumes, in intricately contrived tableaux before capturing their image on photographic plates.

Until the 16^th of June 2024, there is a temporary exhibition of photographs by Cameron at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Many of Julia’s photographs are on display alongside those of another woman photographer, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Although Woodman’s photographs are of a high quality artistically, seeing them alongside those of Julia Margaret Cameron added little to my enjoyment of the exhibition. However, this show does give impressive exposure to Cameron’s pioneering work in using photography as an art form rather than as a medium for recording likenesses. As exhibitions go, I did not feel that this one is a sparkling example of curating. However, I am pleased that I went because I have read a great deal about the life and times Julia Margaret Cameron, and have also published a short book about her, which is available on Amazon: