Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs and Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography
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The catalogue raisonné is art history’s effort to associate itself with Enlightenment science. Identifying the complete production of a particular artist according to a consistent, authoritative, reasoned taxonomy, this kind of publication has long been a staple of academic art history. So it might surprise some to know that this volume is the first time a catalogue raisonné has been dedicated to the work of a photographer. The project has required its authors—representing the combined...
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Julia Margaret Cameron:  The Complete Photographs and Julia Margaret Cameron:  A Critical Biography
The catalogue raisonné is art history’s effort to associate itself with Enlightenment science. Identifying the complete production of a particular artist according to a consistent, authoritative, reasoned taxonomy, this kind of publication has long been a staple of academic art history. So it might surprise some to know that this volume is the first time a catalogue raisonné has been dedicated to the work of a photographer. The project has required its authors—representing the combined resources of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford, England—to face up to some of the more troublesome facts of photographic life—facts usually conveniently repressed in prevailing histories of the medium. What, after all, is a “photograph”: the negative, a positive print, or all the prints from a particular negative? Or is it a more virtual entity, the “image” created in the back of a camera at the moment of exposure? The difficulty of answering this question is what makes the task of putting together a “complete” catalogue of any photographer’s work so complicated, both conceptually and logistically.

Despite these difficulties, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs does manage to provide a compendium of hitherto hidden information about the working habits of the English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). In 1863, at the age of forty-eight, Cameron, wife of a retired lawyer and coffee plantation owner, and mother of six of her own children and of several adoptees, received a large-format wet collodion camera as a gift. She was soon touting her first success and making albums of her images for friends and family members, many of whom were the subjects of these same pictures. These friends included such Victorian notables as Alfred Tennyson, George Frederic Watts, Henry Taylor, and John Herschel. Cameron is sometimes depicted as a kind of charming English eccentric, but this catalogue reveals her to be a hard-headed and very ambitious professional photographer. She began making photographs in January 1864; by May she had registered ten of her pictures for government copyright protection. In this same year, she showed her work at the annual exhibitions of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland, joining both organizations. In 1865, Cameron presented a print to the British Museum and gave others to Henry Cole at the Victoria and Albert Museum; he then purchased another eighty and offered her the use of rooms for portrait taking when she was in London. By July she was selling her work through Colnaghi & Co. in London, and in November had her first public one-person exhibition at the French gallery in Pall Mall, London (showing no less than 151 photographs!). In this same year, her work was also shown in exhibitions in Berlin, Dublin, and London. During the next eleven years, Cameron also exhibited prints in Paris, the Netherlands, London, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Vienna, and even Sydney, Australia. In October of 1875, she moved to the family plantations in Ceylon, where she continued to make photographs until her death in 1879.

Cameron was a prominent and much-reviewed photographer during her lifetime, and this attention continued after her death, fostered first by family members (these included Virginia Woolf, who wrote a play about Cameron’s life on the Isle of Wight) and more recently by collectors and museums who own examples of her work (that work is represented in eighty-six public institutions in the United States alone). But despite the numerous publications dedicated to Cameron’s photography, it turns out that less than 40 percent of her photographs had been reproduced before this. The authors identify 1,225 individual images by Cameron (and this is by no means all of her work; of 508 images that she copyrighted, only 249 have thus far been identified). Their fastidious research allows all sorts of further statistical information to be deduced. For example, they discovered that Cameron made eleven solo portraits of Alice Liddell (more famously photographed in her younger years by Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), rather than the two or three previously known. But this number pales beside the fifty pictures she made of her niece Julia Jackson or the thirty-two individual studies she took of poet Henry Taylor, suggesting her obsessive interest in both subjects. But perhaps the most surprising fact to come out of all this research regards Cameron’s effort to disseminate her work; she apparently issued one-fifth of her images in a reduced-size carte-de-visite or cabinet-card format, sometimes gathering these smaller versions in demonstration albums and often giving them away as gifts. Indeed, this catalogue provides a lot of information about Cameron’s various efforts to promote her work, from her decision to offer her prints to artists at half price to her investment in the reproduction of seventy of her images as carbon prints.

This book also has a lot to tell us about her working methods, including the many creative experiments she conducted with her medium. As is well known, Cameron preferred to shoot her images in differential focus, declaring, in the face of much criticism from other photographers: “What is focus—& who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?—My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry & Beauty—”. She was also notorious for her sloppy printmaking, leaving fingerprints and other imperfections in the albumen surface of the finished photograph. But she also sometimes deliberately scratched her negatives (to leave a halo over the head one of her subjects), wrote in ink on the albumen print itself (filling in lines from a letter being read by her subject), collaborated with other photographers, experimented with silhouette formats and photograms, smoked the back of a negative to produce the appearance of diaphanous clouds in the finished print, bleached a print to give its subject an unearthly radiance, employed composite printing where it suited her (even combining photograms and camera images), and at least three times printed her negatives in reverse (producing a more diffuse version of the image as a result). It seems she also might have made ambrotypes and had her images applied to porcelain. In short, she was an inveterate experimenter with the photographic medium, always with an eye toward enhancing the artistic potential of her prints.

The catalogue comes with four essays and six appendices (dedicated to such details as copyright registers, inscriptions, lists of sitters, and sources of inspiration). For some reason, it does not reproduce Cameron’s unfinished autobiography of 1874 or her poems or letters relating to photography, nor does it provide a complete record of the exhibitions of her work held during her lifetime (the Sydney exhibition, for example, is not listed). The essays, while thorough and often illuminating, lean toward the informational rather than the interpretive. The same might be said for Colin Ford’s separate book, Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography (apparently the word “critical” has lost any association it once had with oppositional thinking), which is content to provide a nicely illustrated biography without adding anything particularly new to our understanding of the meanings of Cameron’s work. This leaves the main interpretive work to the internal architecture of the catalogue. The authors claim to have based their taxonomy on that of Cameron herself, but where she lists her work under Portraits, Madonna Groups, and Fancy Subjects they reproduce it under eight segregated chapter headings: Beginnings, Religion, Women, Men, Children, Illustrations, Idylls, and Ceylon. One result of this organization, apart from an artificial sense of coherence, is that it is impossible to leaf through the illustrations in chronological order. It also implies that the theological qualities of Cameron’s images are confined to those pictures that literally illustrate Biblical themes or characters. This precludes the possibility offered by Mike Weaver in his book on the artist, Julia Margaret Cameron 1815–1879 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984). Weaver reads Cameron’s pictures in terms of her membership of the Oxford Tractarians, a High Church sect of the Anglican faith. He argues that her work reproduces “types” that correspond with matching figures from the Bible, such that Arthur and his Knights are seen to inhabit a kind of parallel universe to that described in the Bible. Thus, for Weaver, all of Cameron’s work can be seen as moral and Christian in character, a trait she shared with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of English painters with whom she associated.