Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

Of course, all vigilant postmodernists will recognize that these are fighting words. But I do think their presence in the current debate is important to register with more than pro forma dismay precisely because they are marshalled to elide and obscure other troubling areas of Cameron's practice, especially as it is located in the everydayness of Victorian domesticity. More than one author has noted that it was exactly this everydayness that Cameron sought to efface in her taste for shrouds and robes, flowing hair and literary archetypes. Rose, for example, writes grandly that for Cameron, "clothing, occupation, class, personality--all these things are transitory and accidental. ... She refused to be influenced by mere circumstance." [33] But was class identity in Victorian culture really all that "accidental" or "transitory?" Try telling that to Cameron's maidservant and photographic subject, the

long-suffering Hillier.

Hillier is the "other" to the well-born Jackson in the Cameron repertory: she is photographed at least as obsessively and is equally central to Cameron's sense of the medium. She appears similarly self-possessed, both complicit and aloof, but always as someone else. Like Victorine Meurent in the paintings of Edouard Manet, Hillier is both immediately recognizable and no one at all, to speak of. She bestows the Kiss of Peace, she allegorizes Spring and Meekness (1864). She is Juliet with Friar Lawrence, the Pale Nun with Sir Galahad (but also, one time, Guinevere). Above all, Hillier is Mary Mother (of God) (1867). But if "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women" would see class as a signifier easily shed in pursuit of the universal, Armstrong's account of the maternalization of photography does not serve us much better. Instead, she sees Hillier-as-Hillier disappearing entirely into Cameron's "project of photographic autoeroticization." [34]

I have a sinking feeling that the two claims are linked. To the extent that we regard Cameron's practice as directed toward producing an "ideal" or affirming a "universal concept" of beauty; or to the extent that we see it as wholly defined by its own self-reflexivity, we need to ask who, to British eyes in the 1870s, had access to this universal and who did not? And who felt the sense of entitlement necessary to make a modern technology their own and who did not? [35] Finally, who was seen to have a biography and who was not? The argument might be made that Hillier could strike Cameron as more of a universal archetype (and be pressed into photographic service more often) precisely because as a parlor maid Hillier would have been assumed by Cameron to have no story of her own, no fortune to hunt, no right to a fashionable contemporaneity (not merely through dress or manner but also through an interest in photography), no brief but to wait on the table and to wait before the camera. In the same way, a visitor to Cameron's home in Sri Lanka tells of a gardener who was hired solely because he had a beautiful back--perfect for photographing. [36] Small matter that Cameron's estate had no gardens to tend. It was the back that counted and as a back is how Cameron saw him.