Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

It is not simply that Cameron's soft-focus, mussed surfaces mark her distance from the crispness of bourgeois realism's instrumental relation to commercial portraiture (not to mention pornography), but that they mark her distance from other central tropes of the mother-photography relationship, especially as they have been written by photography's theoretical sons. Marcel Proust and Siegfried Kracauer both confronted the limits of photography's capabilities as an image of memory through the experience of viewing images of their grandmothers. Proust's uncanny sensation of seeing his beloved grandmother through eyes that had temporarily become a "photographic plate," and Kracauer's incredulous encounter with a photograph of his grandmother as a young girl ("Is this what grandmother looked like?") serve to stage the traumatic scene through which photography's tendency to substitute mindless anecdotal detail displaces the tender knowledge achieved through long habits of proximity. [28] Most famously, Roland Bart hes's "ontological desire" to "learn at all costs what Photography was 'in itself'" is animated by the poignant quest for a "just image" of his mother. For Barthes, the mother figures first as an image of real and almost unbearable loss: her recent passing prompts him to sort through a box of old family photographs. But she is to be found in none of the holiday and home snapshots dating from Barthes's childhood. Instead the mother reappears in her plenitude in the paradoxical form of a photograph of herself as a child, standing with her brother in the glassed-in shelter of a "Winter Garden." It is a photograph that, Barthes wrote, "contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer"--an essential distillation of her "unique being." [29] All of these filial alignments of the maternal with photography dwell within photography's reality effects, however partial and incomplete, its aptitude--both seductive and misleading--for recording detail, its mirror-like fidelity to a present th at photographically enters the past stripped of its affect. Barthes perhaps draws closest to what is at stake in Cameron's work in his preoccupation with the "excess" of the Winter Garden photograph, but it is an excess that emanates as much from the spectator/son's phantasmatic connection to the subject of the image as from photography itself. For Barthes, photography is primarily experienced as a generalized medium, a conduit of images sorted, selected and activated by the viewer, rather than a practice engaged in particular and concrete ways by the photographer (for him or herself). [30]

This is where the maternal model as seen through Cameron has the most to offer. It is not so much the illusion of reality, but the explicit artificing of photography's reality effects that seems at stake in her work--not so much the affective relation of the photographer (or viewer) to the subject but to photography itself, its potentially smearable and abraded or clean and glossy chemistry as much as its potentially fuzzy or crystalline optics. Whether she completely intended it or not, her photographs were weird then and remain so today; through their very photographicness they are difficult to align with the transparent reproduction of a domestic ideology of "business as usual." This is also where "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women" most disappoints. At its best the exhibition takes a compromise position: "Cameron's pictures of female subjects," Wolf hedges, "may be seen as a composite portrait of sorts, no single image telling us about the whole of Victorian women's experience, but different and sometimes c ontradictory portraits showing the many facets of a changing world." [31] In this way Wolf acknowledges the strange beauty of Cameron's photographs only to explain them away as normative, their peculiarities easily located within a constellation of Victorian attitudes toward sexuality, spirituality and domestic and intellectual life. To the extent that we respond to the eroticism of many of Cameron's photographs, for example, Wolf reassures us that this only proves that "Cameron was not a prude. Indeed both her and her husband believed sensuality and sexual desire to be normal impulses, part of being human." [32] At its worst, the exhibition muddied such sociological pronouncements with a problematic celebration of beauty, ideality and essential femininity.