Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

"Women mother?."

--Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering

In the beginning Julia Margaret Cameron's place in the history of photography was secured by her portraits of great men. Her portraits of poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor lifted her out of the domestic confines of chicken-coop studios and amateur theatricals. Her portraits of artists George Frederick Watts and William Holman Hunt allowed her penchant for soft focus, ethereal lighting and smudgy printing to be read as aesthetic gravitas rather than amateurish error. Her portraits of scientists John Herschel and Charles Darwin tempered her general reputation for kookiness and immoderate devotion to Art. Even though her great niece Virginia Woolf published a more varied selection of Cameron's images entitled Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women in 1926, it has long seemed abundantly clear that the "fair women" were something else--stagey, as old-fashioned as a frilly Valentine, beautiful, yes, but also more than a little embarrassing.

Times have certainly changed, as have Cameron's critical fortunes. From a Victorian footnote to the history of photographic modernism, she has become the Mother of all art photography. Her moody Madonnas, medieval damsels in distress, fleshy babies and sulky cupids are seen as the objects of another form of subjectivity, the "maternality" of her photographic vision, its insistent overlaying of embracing sight and tender touch, the rebuttal to a purely optical, phallocentric gaze. The revisionist wave began with Mike Weaver, whose 1984 monograph entitled Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879 was followed by Whisper of the Muse: The Overstone Album and Other Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1986. Weaver's sensitive reading of the strong strain of Christian piety and analogical thinking that informed Cameron's practice was accompanied by a sharp attack on those who persisted in seeing Cameron's work through the lens of her legendary eccentricity. "They deserve our indignation," he fumed. "It is a cheap calu mny against a completely centered woman." [1] From there it seemed only a short leap to the argument that such a centered woman could produce nothing less than woman-centered art. Carol Mayor ecstatically rewrote Cameron's Madonnas as figures of female difference, proclaiming "I love Cameron's fallen Madonnas. They are altered images of Mother, scratched with sexuality and printed with flesh." [2] Carol Armstrong weighed in with a more measured and nuanced but no less impassioned reading of Cameron's maternalization of photography and its processes, "photography," as Armstrong would have it, "under the sway of the Mother, rather than the law of the Father." [3]

In 1998 Sylvia Wolf curated "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women," focusing with near exclusivity on the Victorian maidens that visited or worked for "Aunt Julia" at Freshwater, her estate on the Isle of Wight, and were drafted into service to play Mary Juliet or Ophelia before her camera. [4] (True, the magnificently bearded Taylor appears in a few images, but we are encouraged to see him as just another prop.) In his exhibition review Andy Grundberg declared Cameron's "women" so arresting as to make her "cast of heroic Victorian males ...seem irrelevant." [5] Armstrong, in turn, dryly lauded the "photographic gynarchy" produced by the "feminine idiosyncrasy" of Cameron's work and working methods, seeing the exhibition, to some degree, as a confirmation of her own take on Cameron. [6]

Of course, not everyone is happy about these current developments. Janet Malcolm was typically judicious, suggesting that while the performative aspects of Cameron's "fancy subject" pictures inspired by literary themes and allegorical subjects might be more appealing to postmodernist than modernist sensibilities, something was potentially lost in the feminist narrowing of curatorial attention to the women and the (by implication, equally feminist) censorship of the comical from the repertory of Cameron anecdotes. "Sylvia Wolf has put many remarkable photographs on view in her show," Malcolm concludes, "but I'm not sure she has done Cameron the feminist justice she believes she has," [7] An even grumpier than usual Deborah Solomon ended her review with the lofty aesthetical lament that "We once went to museums to muse on masterpieces. Now we go to muse on female muses," concluding with girlish longing, "It's enough to fill me with a Cameron-like craving for bearded faces: Please, bring back the guys." [8]

Such complaints might have been expected, even from within the womanly ranks. As the Guerrilla Girls keep reminding us: baby, we still have a long way to go. As the major bone of critical contention, these objections are nonetheless disheartening. Organizing an exhibition around Cameron's photographs of women strikes me as no more arbitrary than organizing an exhibition of Impressionist paintings around snow or one limited to artists patronized by Charles Saatchi. What is equally disheartening is the way in which the catalog attempts to forestall these assaults on the narrow selectivity of the feminine focus. It begins on the opening pages when James Wood, Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, assures readers that "Artistic excellence was a critical criterion in the selection of Cameron's prints for this exhibition." [9] It gathers hyperbolic steam when Phyllis Rose dubs Cameron's production "one of the greatest outpourings of creativity in the history of art," concluding her catalog essay with the exhor tation that we notice "how splendidly the women stand on their own." [10] It takes on the weight of curatorial dictum when Wolf stipulates that while Cameron herself may have written that men are "great thro' genius" and women great "thro' love," her photographs tell a different story. Arguing that "it is in [Cameron's] portraits of women that she gave herself the most room for artistic experimentation and that she displays the greatest range," Wolf concludes that such range and perceptiveness could only be the work of "an artist with an exalted sense of her mission ... who was great through love and through genius." [11]