JULIA MARGARET CAMERON
LOREN MITCHELL – S1403359
CUVPH1402A
BIOGRAPHY & CAREER
• Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta, India on June 11,
1815.
• Educated in France, but returned to India, and in 1838 married
Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law
Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her
senior.
• In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to
London, England.
• In 1860 Cameron visited poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of
Wight. Julia was taken with the location and soon after the
Cameron family purchased a property on the island.
• Taking pictures became her hobby and later on, it transformed
into her greatest passion and obsession until the last years of her
life.
• Another thing which differentiated Julia Margaret Cameron
from other photographers was that her pictures had technical
flaws.
• Others were taken purposely out of focus, some were soft and
very picturesque.
• She did not take photos to earn a living which was why her craft
was considered to be experimental and unconventional.
• In spite of this, she marked a solid place in the history of
photography.
• She had a profound capacity to visualize and her images
illuminated her chosen subjects’ personalities.
• She made use of large photographic plates, dark backgrounds,
and subdued lighting and she required her models to sit for a
long time.
• The women in Cameron’s photographs imbued tragic heroines
whose sadness made them appear both beautiful and pure.
• Her work centered around females but she also took portraits of
eminent males such as the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert
Browning, the painter George Frederic Watts, and the scientist
Charles Darwin, to name a few.
WORKING METHODS
• Cameron made albumen-silver prints from wet collodion glass
plate negatives.
• She was innovative & unconventional in her approach to the
technical applications of her medium in order to create images
transcending a purely descriptive function of photography.
• From the late 1850s she came into contact with established
practitioners, posed for portrait sittings, assembled albums for
her family and friends and in the early 1860s even began
printing the negatives of other photographers.
PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES
• 'I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl
house became my glass house! The home to hens and chickens
soon changed to that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely
maidens.’
• Cameron also worried about using dangerous chemicals
including cyanide of potassium.
USE OF FOCUS
• Focus seems to be the most discussed aspect of the photography
of Julia Margaret Cameron.
• She was criticised by some of her contemporaries for what they
considered the technical failure of her work given that the
collodian negative could produce images of great clarity and
detail.
• Cameron explained 'my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures
were a fluke. When focusing & coming to something which, to my
eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on
the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers
insist upon.’
• MAKING A NEGATIVE
• Cameron used a standard sliding-box camera and a
French made Jamin lens with a fixed aperture of
f3.6 and a focal length of roughly 12 inches.
• After removing the lens cap the exposure time
required was between 3 and 7 minutes.
• The glass plate was then taken back to the dark
room still damp (thus 'wet plate' or 'wet collodion'
negative) and a solution of developer was poured
over it.
• The negative was washed and then bathed in hypo
or cyanide to fix the image and remove unexposed
silver salts.
• It was washed again and finally coated with varnish
to enable multiple prints to be made from the plate
without damaging it.
EXPERIMENTS IN PRINTING
• She was adventurous, innovative and unpredictable in
the methods she employed to compose her
photographs, the expressive power of a composition
over riding her concerns for technical perfection.
• Cameron frequently scratched and drew into her
negatives, scraped away emulsion to delete unwanted
figures, cut prints to the shape that she desired and
even made composite prints from her negatives to
suggest a new meaning or reading of the photograph.
• Cameron demonstrated her skill in manipulating
form, light and focus to create expressive and
compelling images on many occasions.
• In the early years of photography, people were trying
to get better quality of the picture, sharp, in focus,
posed, etc. Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneer in
her way. Her portraits were blurry and out of focus.
We owe her for making female portraits look even
more feminine and for creating photographs with
meanings (besides just capturing function).
• Her portraits were full of beauty, intelligence and
spirituality. She felt that photographer’s purpose was
to reveal their manifestation in the faces of
outstanding individuals. She thought that individual
will and the love of beauty could make the invisible
visible. She left many written notes of her thoughts
and referees to literacy and religious themes.
• Julia Cameron was viewed as an eccentric.
• She both embodied and opposed conventional ideas about
feminine behavior.
• She let women let their hair down, because to her it looked
beautiful that way, but it was totally against the prevailing
thoughts of those days.
• She was often criticized for her sloppy technique, but she was not
concerned with perfection, but capturing the essence of
individuals.
• In her portraits, figures are still posed, but with accordance to
biblical, mythological or literacy works.
• Often she would make portraits on long exposures and let her
subject move to intentionally create out of focus effect.
• Some contemporary photographers were not accepting her
technique and were even making her work a laughingstock.
• Though, her family and friends were very supportive and she was
one of the prominent amateur photographers of that time.
Beatrice May Prinsep - 1866
Paul & Virginia - 1865
‘I Wait’ – Rachel Gurney 1872
Hatty Campbell - 1868
The Kiss of Peace - 1869
WHY CHOOSE JMC?
When choosing Julia Margaret Cameron, I wanted to best
capture the feeling I had when seeing her images for the first
time.
I was drawn to the warmth, dreamy and whimsical look of her
portraits especially ‘The Kiss of Peace” and intrigued by the
technique she used to convey these feelings so effectively.
Method:
In starting out I chosen my 5 favourite portraits and then
started to think about who I would ask to model for me in my
attempt to replicate Julia’s work. One of the most important
aspects I wanted to duplicate was the long hair to add to the
free, relaxed feeling of the images. Unlike any other
photography I had seen from the same era.
On securing my models I then acquired a backdrop, that I
borrowed from the NMIT, to add to the authenticity of the
shoot.
I also wanted to replicate the clothing shown in the photos – use of
calico and satin as well as the props used in “I Wait” – the angel
wings and in ‘Paul and Virginia’s portrait – the parasol.
When researching and thinking about the camera equipment and
lighting I would use I decided to use a portrait lens and also only
use 1 light source, as Julia had done.
There were limitations with space I had available in which to set up
my studio but overall I feel this was achieved.
During the photo shoot I attempted to best copy the posing and
expressions captured in the original portraits. Most importantly
where the shadows feel on the faces, the tilt and angle of the heads,
the way the light fell on the subject. My main aim to mirror the
technique and the look of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Once the shoot was completed I then explored and utilised the
various techniques in Adobe Photoshop to best replicate the soft
appearance and warmth these portraits needed to convey.
With regard to printing the five photos I made acetate negatives of each
portrait in 8”x10”inch sizing, from there I applied two coats of Van Dyke
Chemical mix to Cold Pressed water colour paper – Stonehenge Cream.
Once the 2 coats were dry the acetate negative was laid flat on the coated
paper and pressed against a wooden backing and an acrylic cover with
bulldogs clips and placed under ultra violet light to expose the image for
approximately 7minutes each.
The acetate negative was then removed and the print soaked in water for 2
minutes, placed in fixer for 2 minutes, then rinsed in water again before
hanging to dry overnight. As my initial prints did not turn out as hoped I
decided to print the images on Museo Portfolio Rag Paper using a matt
black ink jet printer. These were then mounted in 16x20inch matt boards.
I intend to revisit the Van Dyke process in coming weeks.
However this will be after our class deadline for submissions.
ACETATE NEGATIVE
VAN DYKE PRINT
In Closing:
Even though she was criticized for her soft photos I love how
she made that her style. It didn’t seem to matter what the
“experts” thought; she was creating something that was her
own. I think that’s important for all of us. There is a point in
listening to critics and how we can improve, but we also need
to listen to our own hearts and Julia Margaret Cameron was
a great example of that.
In the early days of photography I think people were not so
much interested in the art of photography, but the accuracy.
They saw it as strictly a way to record a scene or a person.
Art was still relegated to painting
Cameron, however, saw photography as an art form.
Her goal was not to record her friends’ and family’s likeness.
She wanted to “secure [for photography] the character and uses
of high art by combining real and ideal, and sacrificing nothing
of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”
In this, I think, she was truly ahead of her time.