Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, Great Men and Others

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

Here is where we encounter the limits of the maternal model as it is currently deployed around Cameron's life and work, and here also, not surprisingly, is where we find the policing mechanism of "museum quality" deployed with greatest force. For when a member of the audience at Wolf's San Francisco lecture asked why none of the Sri Lankan photographs from the late 1870s had been included in the exhibition, Wolf's answer was simply that there were not enough good ones, and even though some were good, these images raised more questions than she could answer in the context of the exhibition. [37] As recently as a few years ago I was stumped when a student asked me if there were any photographs from Cameron's last years in Sri Lanka. I did not know. However, scholars interested in post-colonial issues and methodologies have greeted the Sri Lankan images with the same interest as feminists greeted the "fair women." Joanne Lukitsh, for example, has invoked Homi K. Bhabha's theorizations of colonial "mimicry" to e xplore the "changeability of photographic authorship" in Cameron's Sri Lankan photographs and the ways in which the production of the colonial subject as a "partial presence" unsettles the viewing position of the photographic author as master (or mistress) of difference. [38] Unfortunately such analyses have largely failed to have a crossover impact. The ongoing incompatibility of post-colonialism and feminism as discourses surrounding Cameron and her work is, for me, a crucial story of the current Cameron revival.

Such incompatibility brings me to one point where I do agree with Rose, who acknowledges the tremendous opacity of Cameron's practice to our eyes. The field of literary associations that "came naturally" to women of her class and

background is foreign to us today. The predisposition toward playacting and dressing up strikes us as less feminine than camp and queer. Victorian conceptions of women's comportment and their place in society as well as everyone else's place in the Victorian age seem strange and confining. This imaginative gap can offer its own pleasures. It suggests, for example, why Cameron looked at a 20-year-old Alice Liddell and saw Pomona, goddess of fertility and the trees, while we look at her blunt cut bangs and defiant arms akimbo and see a potential Xena, Warrior Princess. But it also means that we should be especially attentive to those moments when our imaginative distance threatens to collapse into sameness. A case in point is the catalog's jarring Juxtaposition of cameron's photograph of a Cingalese Girl (1875) with Irving Penn's slick image of Three Girls, One Reclining; Dahomey (1967), a pairing that only serves to suggest how little distance we have come from the zoo-like display of indigenous peoples in the World's Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how close we remain to Cameron's times in persisting in seeing racial difference as "true" otherness, or at least a "special case." [39]