Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

Despite such explicit ambitiousness, or perhaps because of it, Cameron also took pains to style herself as deferential to paternal approval. "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight," she wrote, "and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause." [15] She modestly explained that her signature style resulted less from skill than a fortuitous accident, owning that "my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke." [16] These Victorian gestures at womanly self-effacement took increasing precedence when Woolf posthumously portrayed Cameron as an unbeautiful bluestocking obsessed by beauty, a woman whose talent seems describable only in tandem with her downright oddness. "She was a terrifying apparition," Woolf recounted with zest, "short and squat with none of the Pattle grace and beauty about her.... Dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from her photography... she dash ed out of the studio ... attached heavy swans' wings to the children's shoulders, and bade them 'Stand there' and play the part of Angels." [17] The Cameron "life" as "legend" was thus forged: with a blithe disregard for table linens sullied with nitrate of silver and hens that were allowed to run free rather than submit to the stewpot, the photographer appears as a (slightly hysterical) woman possessed, mobilizing family, friends and servants before her camera with a motherly single-mindedness not completely distinguishable from that of a field marshal on maneuvers.

In 1875 such photographic high jinks, however delightful or traumatic, seemed doomed when the family fortunes took a decisive turn for the worse and Cameron and her husband moved back to their plantation in Sri Lanka. Her story generally ends at this point, or at least the master narrative of Cameron's life and work would have it that way. Cameron did set up her camera in Sri Lanka and made a number of photographs there. But in what stood for many years as the major Cameron monograph, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (1948), Helmut Gernsheim dismissed "these pictures of natives ... [as] quite unimportant." [18] Armstrong concurs, relegating the period to a footnote in which she observes that for all intents and purposes the move to Sri Lanka meant that Cameron's "career as a photographer was over." [19] "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women" featured none of these native compositions. Rose briefly mentions them as "strikingly different," observing that their dark-skinned models appear more re sistant to allegorical transformation by a magical "wave of the photographer's wand" than the "fair women" of England. [20] We might pause at such critical attempts at foreclosure (I will return to them later), but fate played its own hand in bringing Cameron's photographic career to an untimely conclusion--she died in Sri Lanka in 1879.

This is where it gets interesting. Cameron's plot can appear contrived to conform to the feminine convention of the woman who strives for achievement but must also deny and disguise it. But it also offers a twist on the family romance that was never envisioned by Sigmund Freud. The romance in this instance turns on a crucial gift from daughter to mother, the gift of the camera itself, which Cameron reports her eldest daughter bestowed upon her with the tender words, "'It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.'" [21] It is worth noting that photography in the 1860s, with its long exposure times and unreliable, messy chemistry, was more hard labor than amusement, but the gift bound photography to motherhood in the Cameron mythology; it is the authorizing narrative for the maternalization of photographic vision that has developed around Cameron's work. [22]