JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879) was a Victorian photographer, who pioneered artistic photography. Rather than using her cameras to attempt to slavishly reproduce reality in her prints, she used cameras and processing techniques to produce an artistic interpretation of her subject matter. It has been said that some of the images she created influenced a few of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who were amongst her friends.
In Julia’s honour, there is an annual prize for women photographers: The Julia’s Margaret Cameron Award. One of the winners of the award in 2024 is the French photographer Muriel Pénicaud. Born in 1955, she served in the French government as Labpur Minister from 2017 to 2020. A self taught photographer, she began taking photographs when she was 11 years old.
There are two exhibitions of Muriel’s work currently (January and February 2025) showing in the former French colony of Pondicherry in the south of India. One of them is at the Kalinka gallery in Kasturba Gandhi street, and the other is at the more centrally located ‘The Spot’: a bar-cum-restaurant (it serves good food).
The majority of Muriel’s photographs on display are in black and white. One of the few coloured ones show a red shoe lying beneath a pile of discarded shoes in drab colours. This image is the photographer’s reaction to the piles of murdered victims’ shoes that can be seen at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
What Muriel achieves in most of her images is the conversion of a mundane sight, say a tree trunk or a bird’s plumage, into a work of art. Without resorting to tricks of focusing and experiments with processing, as did Julia Margaret Cameron, Muriel, like Julia did, transforms the ordinary into the visually extraordinary in subtly delicate ways. She creates a new way of looking at the world by making her subject matter look intriguing. She deserves a prize that honours the pioneer of artistic photography: Julia Margaret Cameron.
You can read more about Julia Margaret Cameron in my book “Between Two Islands: Julia Margaret Cameron and her Circle.” This book (also Kindle) is available from Amazon, e.g., https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0BZFCVLX9/
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 16th 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:
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892), the famous Victorian poet, had his home, Farringford House, at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight. First, he rented the house in 1853, and then bought it in 1856. Because he was pestered by so many tourists, he moved to Aldworth in West Sussex in 1869. However, he kept Farringford, and spent most winters there. In 1860, his friend, the creative photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), bought a house, Dimbola, which was very close to Farringford.
In 1897, a memorial to the poet was erected on Tennyson Down, a clifftop high above Farringford and Dimbola. Designed by JL Pearson, it is a tall stone Celtic cross mounted on a stepped base. A gently sloped footpath leads from Dimbola to the memorial, but we did not use this. Instead, my friend Martin and I laboriously climbed a steeper path closer to it. The cross is impressive and dramatic against the wide-open sky – almost Wagnerian. The views from the clifftop were magnificent on the clear day we visited it.
Our descent from the clifftop was somewhat adventurous. This was not intentional. Because we could not remember the place the path (and staircase), which we ascended, began, we had to create our own route down the steep, almost vertiginous, wooded slopes. We had to be careful not to trip over the numerous tree roots and fallen branches that were hidden under fallen leaves that lay all over the place. I was quite relieved when we reached the car park without having fallen or strained our ankles. Next time I visit the poet’s memorial, I will use the lengthier but safer footpath.
You can read more about Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron, “Between Two Islands. Julia Margaret Cameron and her Circle”, available from Amazon sites such as:
YESTERDAY (THE 4th OF OCTOBER 2023), I gave a short talk to introduce my book about the pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Born in Calcutta (Kolkata), she died in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Between 1860 and 1875, Julia and her family lived at Freshwater Bay (on the Isle of Wight) in a house called Dimbola. It was named after one of Mr Cameron’s coffee plantations (Dimbula) in Ceylon. The house at Freshwater Bay is now a well-curated museum dedicated to Julia and her photographic works. It was in its large tearoom, once the Cameron’s dining room, that I gave my brief talk.
When the Cameron’s bought Dimbola (at Freshwater), which is close to the house where the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson lived, it was a group of two separate cottages. Builders were employed to join the two buildings to create one large residence. A crenelated tower was constructed to join the two formerly separated edifices. From the outside Dimbola appears to be a typical Victorian construction. However, inside a treat awaits the visitor.
Apart from the interesting exhibits in the museum, some of the house’s internal decorative features deserve attention. There is much timberwork that reminds one of India. The Cameron’s designed parts of their house in what is often known as the ‘Indo-Saracenic’ style. This is an often-successful marriage of gothic and Islamic architectural details. Wikipedia expands on this as follows:
“Indo-Saracenic architecture (also known as Indo-Gothic, Mughal-Gothic, Neo-Mughal, in the 19th century often Hindoo style) was a revivalist architectural style mostly used by British architects in India in the later 19th century, especially in public and government buildings in the British Raj, and the palaces of rulers of the princely states. It drew stylistic and decorative elements from native Indo-Islamic architecture, especially Mughal architecture, which the British regarded as the classic Indian style, and, less often, from Hindu temple architecture.”
Apart from the magnificent example of this decorative style in the Durbar Room at Osborne House (on the Isle of Wight), there are few if any examples of its usage in houses in England that can rival that which can be seen at Dimbola. Fortunately, Dimbola was saved from demolition late in the last century. Had it been demolished to make room for holiday flats, this superb example of the use of Indo-Saracenic style, which harmonises well with some of Dimbola’s Arts and Craft style details, would have been lost. During recent restoration of the house, the walls have been covered with reproductions of the Arts and Craft Style wall papers that used to decorate the place back in the 19th century. Some fragments of the original William Morris wallpapers were discovered during the restoration works. In addition, a wall with Victorian paintwork was found, and has been preserved, albeit a little faded, in its original state.
A visit to Freshwater’s Dimbola is worthwhile, not only to imbibe the atmosphere of the home of the charismatic Victorian photographer but also to enjoy excellent coffee and home-made cakes in its delightful café. And while you are there, you can buy a copy of my book “BETWEEN TWO ISLANDS: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON AND HER CIRCLE” in the museum’s small shop. If you are unable to reach Dimbola, you can get a copy from Amazon sites such as:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BZFCVLX9/
THE PHOTOGRAPHER BALDWIN Lee, a Chinese American, was born in Brooklyn (New York) in 1951. He studied photography at MIT and then at Yale. In 1982, he was appointed Professor of Photography at the University of Tennessee, where he established the university’s photography course. As a New Yorker born and bred, he was amazed at the contrast between living conditions in the southern states and where he had come from. He began making tours of the south, photographing members of various African Americans at home, at work, and at play. Over the years he took more than 10000 photos. All of them are in the black and white format. Apart from being fascinating glimpses of the everyday lives of low income ‘black’ Southerners, they are beautifully composed, superbly detailed images – well worth seeing, as we did recently at the David Hill Gallery in London’s Ladbroke Grove.
At his gallery, David Hill discussed Lee’s work with us. What particularly interested me was that Lee used (still uses) an old-fashioned field camera with a lens made before WW1. He chose this old lens because unlike modern lenses its glass has no coating. Also, and this is something I learned long ago, many of these older lenses were hand ground, rather than machine made. This resulted in the lens having a far better resolution than many of the best quality lenses that were available in the 1980s. The type of camera that Lee used to make his splendid photographs was not dissimilar to the kind of camera that early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) used to create images. The lens on the simple camera that Lee used projects an image onto a ground glass screen at the back of the camera. In Victorian times, a prepared glass photographic plate used to be attached to the rear of the camera to capture the image. Lee, working more that 100 years later, captured his images on sheets of 5×4 inch high quality, fast negative monochrome film. Using these, Lee was able to create high resolution photographic images, and his subjects did not have to hold their poses for nearly as long as was the case when Cameron was creating her photographs. Because Lee’s subjects did not have to maintain their poses for more than a few seconds, his images are far clearer than Cameron’s whose subjects often had to try to remain still for many minutes. This meant that in addition to the deliberate artistic manipulations that Cameron made in her dark room, the inevitable slight movements that her subjects made added to the interestingly other-worldly images she created.
The advantage of using an old-fashioned camera and lens, such as Lee employed, was that it was a high-quality pin-hole camera. Unlike modern cameras, these present hardly anything that might alter the light entering the camera and affect the images. I found it fascinating that apart from taking advantage of the improvements in film quality this superb photographer prefers to use a camera that would have been familiar to Julia Margaret Cameron rather than a modern one that made the light entering it take a complicated path from the outside world to the film surface.
You can read more about Cameron in my book, which is available here:
RECENTLY I PUBLISHED a book about the highly innovative Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (‘JMC’; 1815-1879). She married a British colonial administrator and lived during the heyday of the British Empire. In my book, I tried to portray her sympathetically, but I do hint briefly that she was a ‘child of her times’ as far as he attitudes towards the colonised was concerned. Today, the 11th of July 2023, I paid a visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery (‘NPG’) to see how JMC and her works are currently presented.
JMC was a friend of the painter George Frederic Watts. His portrait of her hangs in the NPG. Another portrait by Watts hanging in the gallery depicts the historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Nearby in another room, you can see Carlyle as portrayed in a photograph taken by JMC. This photograph is close to JMC’s photograph (see photo above) of Edward John Eyre (1815-1901). As British Governor of Jamaica, this gentleman was responsible for the brutal suppression of a revolt against British rule on the island. Under his command, 1000 homes were burned and 439 people were killed. Although this outraged many in Britain, it was defended by people such as Carlyle. Eyre’s portrait, made whilst he was awaiting trial, was, according to the NPG’s label, crafted by JMC to make him seem as if he was vulnerable and not:
“… a ruthless murderer but a sensitive man of duty.”
Another caption, next to a photograph of JMC by an unknown photographer suggests that her:
“… photographs are admired for their beauty and artistry. They also reflect the values of the Victorian era. Her portrait of Governor Eyre indicates her support for him following his violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising.”
From what I have just written, you might get the impression that someone who composes the labels in the NPG is disapproving of JMC. Much as I feel that JMC’s apparent support for Eyre (and Carlyle) is not to my 21st century taste, one must remember that Cameron was living in a time when any uprising in the colonies would have been regarded as a dangerous – even apocalyptic – threat to the privileged life that she and her contemporaries enjoyed.
In all fairness to the NPG, they also have on public display one of JMC’s photographs of a less controversial sitter – the scientist Sir John Herschel (1792-1871). JMC met him in South Africa whilst she was convalescing from an illness she caught in India where she was living in 1837. It was Herschel who sparked off JMC’s enduring fascination with photography, which really ‘took off’ when she received her first camera in late 1863. She was then living on the Isle of Wight next door to her friend the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.
JMC did not confine herself to taking photographs of defenders of colonialism. She made wonderful photographs of anyone she could find – both famous and completely unknown. What distinguished her work from that of her contemporaries is that, by experimenting with techniques in the studio and also in the darkroom, she created photographs that were works of art rather than slavish attempts to record real life accurately. Like great portrait painters, her photographic portraits give the viewer a sense of the sitter’s inner personality as well as his or her physical appearance.
SOME OF MY REGULAR readers will know that recently I published a short book about the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Her photographic creations, which she produced mainly between 1863 and 1875, differed significantly from those of her contemporaries. At the time that she was taking pictures, most other photographers concentrated on using their cameras to produce slavishly accurate renderings of their subject matter – often portraiture. In contrast, Julia experimented with her focussing, film processing, and other aspects of creating photographic images, to create imaginative artworks, often achieving effects that had been hitherto impossible for painters to produce. She used the camera not to reproduce nature but to produce often expressionistic or impressionistic renderings of her subject matter. For her, the camera was not merely a method of mirroring reality, but a pathway to creating works of art.
Today, the 23rd of May 2023, I visited the Waddington Custot gallery on London’s Cork Street. My wife and I enjoyed viewing an exhibition, “Picture This: Photorealism 1966-1985” – Photorealism was a term created by Louis K Meisel in 1969. The show continues until the 24th of June 2023. At first sight the pictures on display seem to be enlarged, well-focussed photographs. Soon, you will notice that these fabulous pictures of scenes in the USA are not photographs, but paintings created using oil and acrylic paints. One of the gallery staff explained that some of them are not images of actual places, but scenes imagined by the artists. Furthermore, he made an interesting point about them. He remarked that the artists have not painted the scenes as they would have appeared to the naked eye, but instead they have painted them how they would have looked if the images of them had been created using photographic techniques. In addition, by making their paintings of often imagined scenes in this way, the viewer is forced into questioning the assumption that photographs capture the truth.
After seeing the exhibition, it occurred to me that whereas Julia Margaret Cameron was using her camera to create art, the Photorealists were doing quite a different thing – creating artworks that imitate what can be achieved by accurate photography.
GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS (1817-1904) was a sculptor and a painter. I first became acquainted with him and his work when I was writing my book about west London (“Beyond Marylebone and Mayfair: Exploring West London”). My interest in him increased when I was writing a book about the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Between about 1850 and 1870, he lived with Thoby and Sara Prinsep’s family, about whom I have written in another book, in the now-demolished Little Holland House in Kensington. Not far from where he lived, there are two bronze statues by Watts: a portrait of Lord Holland in Holland Park, and the equestrian sculpture “Physical Energy” in Kensington Gardens. While living with the Prinseps, Watts met Julia Cameron, who was Sara’s sister. Cameron lived at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight in a house that neighboured the property where the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson lived. Watts, who had helped the Prinseps rent Little Holland House, was a frequent visitor to Freshwater, where he met and socialised with both Tennyson and Cameron. Watts, who was briefly married to the actress Ellen Terry, painted Tennyson several times and was himself photographed by Cameron. And Watts painted at least one portrait of Cameron – now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Apart from the numerous paintings and sculptures created by Watts, one of his most unusual works is neither a sculpture nor a painting – it is what one might describe as a precursor of Conceptual Art. Although attractive, the concept that it conveys – self-sacrifice – is more important than its appearance. Located in Postman’s Park, which extends from Aldersgate Street to King Edward Street, it is a memorial to ordinary people who lost their lives during peacetime whilst trying to save those of others. Created in 1898 but conceived by Watts in 1887, the work of art is called “Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice”. It consists of a stretch of wall protected from the elements by a wooden loggia, which was designed by Ernest George who helped design the buildings at the Golders Green Crematorium. On the wall there are memorials to those who sacrificed their lives whilst rescuing others. Each memorial is made of ceramic tiles and records the name of the hero and a brief account of how he or she met their deaths. The first four memorials were designed and made by William de Morgan. Later, others were made by the Royal Doulton pottery. There is room for 120 memorials but by 1931, only 53 had been placed. In 2009, the Diocese of London permitted another memorial to be added.
Watts supervised this project. When he died, his widow, his second wife Mary, took over its supervision, but after a while she lost interest in it as she began concentrating on the management of the Watts Mortuary Chapel and the Watts Gallery – both near Compton in Surrey. The memorial is in Postman’s Park, which was formerly the graveyard of the nearby St Botolphs Aldersgate Church and is, I am guessing, maintained by the Church of England or a local authority.
The memorials are both fascinating and moving. Here are a few examples:
“Mary Rogers. Stewardess of the Stella. Mar 30 1899.Self sacrificed by giving up her life belt and voluntarily going down in the sinking ship.”
“Herbert Peter Cazaly. Stationer’s clerk. Who was drowned at Kew in endeavouring to save a man from drowning. April 21, 1889”
“Herbert Maconoghu. School boy from Wimbledon aged 13. His parents absent in India, lost his life in vainly trying to rescue his two school fellows who were drowned at Glovers Pool, Croyde, North Devon. August 28, 1882”
According to Wikipedia:
“Maconoghu was actually Herbert Moore McConaghey, the son of Matthew and Martha McConaghey, and he was born in Mynpoorie in India where Matthew was working as a settlement officer for the Imperial Civil Service,”
Standing amidst these memorials is a small sculpture depicting Watts. Its inscription reads:
“The Utmost for the Highest. In memoriam George Frederic Watts, who desiring to honour heroic self-sacrifice placed these records here.”
Luckily for us, Watts’s unusual creation has been kept in good condition. Since 1972, it has been a protected structure. Unlike most of the art made by Watts, the memorial in Postman’s Park was an idea created by him, rather than something he made with his own hands. I had seen the memorial several times in the past, but today, the 17th of May 2023, I took my wife to see it for the first time. A few weeks earlier, while visiting the Tate Britain, we had seen an art installation by Susan Hiller. It incorporated photographs of 41 of the memorials on Watts’s wall of memory in Postman’s Park. Having seen this, we wanted to see the original, and were not disappointed.
You can discover more about Julia Margaret Cameron, Tennyson, the Prinsep family, and Watts in my book “Between Two Islands: Julia Margaret Cameron and her Circle”, which is available from Amazon:
ALMOST WITHOUT REALISING IT, it seems that I have developed an interest in 19th century photographers. A visit to the Isle of Wight in 2022 led to me becoming interested in the life and work of the pioneer of artistic photography – Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). She lived at Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight between 1860 and 1875. It was here that she produced most of her highly creative photographs. I have written a book about her: “Between Two Islands: Julia Margaret Cameron and Her Circle”.
Five years after Julia left the Isle of Wight, my great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg travelled from the German Empire to King Williams Town (‘KWT’) in the eastern part of what was then the southern African Cape Colony. Aged 18, he arrived there with his future brother-in-law Jakob Rindl. The two men set up what became a successful commercial photographic studio in the town, which they might have chosen because many of its European inhabitants were German speakers. Although Jakob continued the studio after 1885, Franz diversified his activities by founding soap, match, and candle factories in the town.
I believe that despite becoming a successful industrialist and politician, Franz continued taking photographs as a hobby. Because of his success in KWT, other members of his family came out from Germany to work in the town. Amongst these were Franz’s nieces, Anna and Else Ginsberg. These two intrepid ladies founded a photographic studio in KWT. They were the first ladies to have opened a commercial photography studio in what was to become South Africa. Of interest, amongst each of the generations of Franz and Jakob’s descendants, there have been keen photographers including myself,
In May 2023, when we visited the city of Funchal on the Portuguese island of Madeira, we came across a museum that helped to bring 19th century photography back to life for me. It is the Museu de Fotografia da Madeira in Rua de Carriera. The museum is housed in what had been the premises of the commercial studio founded by Vicente Gomes da Silva (1827-1906) in 1863. The studio remained in business until 1978. In 1982, the Regional Government of Madeira purchased the building – Atelier Vicente – and used it for a museum of photography.
Vicente Gomes da Silva became interested in photography in 1856, and by 1859 he was recorded as an amateur photographer in a local newspaper published in the June of that year. By 1863, he had made photography his business venture, and moved into the Atelier on Rua Carriera in 1865. A year later, he was appointed photographer to the Empress of Austria. His son, also called Vicente, continued the business, and was appointed photographer to the Portuguese royal family in 1903.
The museum is interesting not only because it exhibits the sorts of cameras that must have been used by my ancestors in South Africa and by Julia Margaret Cameron, but also because features that were characteristic of early photographic studios have been maintained and explained. The Atelier was opened before there was electricity on Madeira. The main studio area was arranged so that it was lit by northern light that filtered through skylights and curtains designed to make it a homogenous light source. Part of the studio’s laboratories had skylights that allowed ingress of sunlight that was required at various stages of preparing the photographic plates. At the back of the studio, there are a set of sliding panels, each painted with a different scene that could be used as a background to the people being photographed. The desired scene could be slid out behind the area where the subjects posed for their pictures. In other rooms, there are exhibits illustrating the history of cameras and photographic processes, as well as a fine collection of reproductions of images captured by some of the many photographers – both Portuguese and others – who worked in Madeira. Some of the foreigners who took photographs on the island included British photographers such as Russell Manners Gordon (1829-1906) and Alexander Lamont Henderson (1837-1907).
Although I have no information about the appearances of the photographic studios used by my relatives in 19th century KWT, seeing the museum helped to give me an inkling of how their workplaces must have been. In the case of Julia Margaret Cameron, the places where she created images in her home, Dimbola, were far more makeshift from what I can gather.
Except for Julia Margaret Cameron, all the photographers I have mentioned, and many others working in the nineteenth century, aimed to create visually accurate images of their subjects. Often crystal clear, these pictures are fascinating but usually lifeless. What made Julia Cameron’s photography both unusual and full of life was her experimentation with focussing and processing. She used the camera not as equipment for capturing real life accurately on film but as a tool for creating works of art, in the same way as a painter uses the brush and the sculptor uses chisels. By doing this, she was far in advance of her time; experimentation with photography as a creative art form really only took off in the 20th century. The portraits and other composition that she created on film successfully captured not only their external appearance but also her astute interpretations of her subjects’ personalities.
Many people will have heard of at least one of the following: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Edward Lear, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and William Dalrymple.
Fewer might be familiar with George Frederic Watts, Valentine Prinsep, Julia Stephen, and Dejazmatch Alamayou Tewodros.
One thing that all of the people listed above share is that they were in diverse ways connected with a Victorian pioneer of artistic photography – Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).
To discover about this fascinating woman and how her story involves all of the above-mentioned, please read “BETWEEN TWO ISLANDS: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON AND HER CIRCLE” by Adam Yamey. It is available both as a paperback and as an e-book from Amazon:
yamey 