Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs

Victorian mise-en-scene photographer Cameron (1815-1879) pronounced her aspirations grandly: “to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.” Julian Cox, an assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, has plumbed the world’s collections to assemble this catalogue raisonn‚, and his labors help Cameron’s art fulfill that ambition. As a book it is little short of revelatory. Cameron’s signature children-as-angels, women-as-Madonnas and other spiritually charged portraits are here in full-page and thumbnail sepia prints (with full provenance and descriptions), and the book follows Cameron’s own preferences for classifying her work, including “Portraits,” “Madonna Groups” and “Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect.” But in an ingenious move, Cox groups multiple portraits of the same sitter, taken at different points in Cameron’s career, on the same pages, so that Cameron’s mysteriously serene men, women and children emerge as actual human beings: side by side photos of the sitter Mary Hillier as Psyche, Sappho, Clio and St. Agnes betray something of Hillier’s own nature. No less astonishing are Cameron’s photos from the period at the end of her life when she followed her husband to a posting in Ceylon, with shots of the native people tinged with colonialism’s gaze-one that seems eerily similar to the beatific shots. Samples of Cameron’s letters, biographical sketches of her subjects, sources of inspiration, essays by Cox and Ford (founder of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television) make up the supporting material. This book is a necessary expense for any Victorianist or early photography buff.