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.
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