Photography as Art: the work of Julia Margaret Cameron

How amazing that Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the first to conceive of photography as an art form, should have attracted so many of the great and good of her age to the remote corner of the Isle of Wight where she lived, and then to have lured them in front of her camera.

We visited her house, Dimbola Lodge, at Freshwater Bay on the south-west coast of the island last week – now a museum dedicated to her work, together with that of her photographic followers. And while new technology of all kinds has brought colour, amazing lenses and instantaneous shutter speeds, none of that obscures the sheer genius of her work of 150 years ago.

Extraordinarily, she was already 48 years old, and had brought up a family, before she owned a camera – given to her as a gift by her daughter in 1863 – and her whole oeuvre was created over a period of just eleven years.

Aside from all the wonderful pictures of her family, the roll-call of her sitters reads as a who’s who of that period – scientists, artists, writers, actors – including Darwin, Ellen Terry, Holman Hunt, Tennyson, Longfellow, GF Watts, Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carlyle, Millais, Burne-Jones and so on. 

The seminal portrait above (from 1867) is of her photographic mentor, the astronomer Sir John Herschel.

Desires we never knew we had

A funny thing happened to Dr Geoffrey Miller. He’s a leading American evolutionary psychologist.

At a conference that brought together economists and psychologists in London in 1999, he noticed for the first time a group of people who looked different from all the academics there.

They were marketers. And they were interested in psychology because they wanted to know more about people’s preferences and how these worked.

Talking with marketers, Dr Miller noticed: “A new world opened up.” He recorded the experience in his book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, where he observed that marketers and marketing-oriented companies “help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined.”

I don’t believe that traditional market research, nearly all borrowed from psychology, did any such thing. In my experience, that sort of enquiry, both qualitative and quantitative, was conducted in the present, holding firmly on to a rear view mirror. And this kind of research still holds sway in many of the more conservative organisations.

But over the past fifteen years or so, a sea-change has occurred whereby newly-developed “insight” processes (based on face-to-face interaction and walking together imaginatively into the future) have gradually replaced that rear-view mirror.

Of course, this work leads marketers to new and more interesting places – but it’s hard to replicate. So it can leave risk-averse managements very fearful of failure.

Trying things out is at the very heart of Darwinian evolution! The point for us is to manage the risks involved.

Filling the world with fools

Until quite recently I’d always assumed that the phrase “survival of the fittest” was Darwin’s own and came from his On the Origin of Species.

But not at all. In fact it was first coined in a letter in 1866 by the economist and philosopher, Herbert Spencer. He had recently read Darwin’s book and noticed the powerful connections between the biologist’s theory of natural selection and his own ideas about how economies work.

Does everyone know this apart from me?

The thinking of both men has stood the test of time. Fitness for purpose in a changing environment is the best, maybe the only, way to survive.

The only major difference is that, in the biological world, most change comes naturally. Whereas in the economic world, the drive to innovate is primarily the result of our own ideas and wills.

Of course, a major exception occurs when governments intervene to distort the market, as they did following the banking crisis. It remains to be seen whether or not the consequence will have been to improve or reduce the fitness for purpose of all those now publicly-owned organisations.

As Spencer put it: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”