Julia Margaret Cameron, Portraitist Who Broke the Rules

New York Times

19-06-2025

More than two centuries after her birth, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) is trendy. The appeal of her photography rests on her scornful disregard of rules, an attitude that colored all aspects of her life. As the daughter of a close friend recalled in a memoir, the artist was not merely unrestrained by 'normal boundaries': She was 'unconscious of their very existence.'
Her portraits have long been critically acclaimed. But 'Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron,' a richly evocative touring exhibition of 77 prints presented at the Morgan Library & Museum by the curators Joel Smith and Allison Pappas, and organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, gives equal attention to her staged tableaus, pictures that in later years were derided as dated and sentimental Victoriana. Tastes change, however. As recent exhibitions by Stan Douglas and Tyler Mitchell demonstrated, posed photographs with historical or literary allusions are in fashion, and Cameron's re-creations of Prospero and Miranda, or of Esther before King Ahasuerus, no longer carry so musty an odor.
Highlighting Cameron's currency, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London last year paired her photographs with those of Francesca Woodman, who died by suicide at 22 in the East Village in 1981. Both artists overlooked, even encouraged, technical imperfections, and photographed young women in poses that could be confrontational, seductive or off-kilter. Also, like Cameron, Woodman staged costumed group portraits that would have disgusted the early critical commissars of modernism.
For me, Cameron's great achievement remains her portraits, especially those of the women who belonged to her family or domestic household and the male eminences she knew well. Raised in Calcutta by a father who worked for the East India Company and a mother of French aristocratic lineage, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a distinguished British civil servant 20 years her senior.
When they relocated from India to England in 1848, eventually settling on the Isle of Wight, their circle included many of the Victorian men she regarded as heroic and photographed that way: among them, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson. 'When I have had such men before my camera,' she wrote, 'my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.' She inscribed on a print of a Carlyle portrait that he was 'like a rough block of Michelangelo's sculpture.'
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