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Arresting Beauty by Julia Margaret Cameron.
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Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron
Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 208 pp., 125 illustrations.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) started photographing in 1863 at age 48, having been given a camera as a gift by her daughter. Most in this new role of 'photographer' valued the camera as an objective tool and used it to collect facts about the world, but Cameron immediately intuited photography’s dual nature as an art form. Among the first to probe its power to transform and provoke feeling, she began by questioning the camera’s most basic function. Despite having the technical prowess to create sharp images, Cameron halted her focus based on what looked most beautiful, asking: “What is focus, and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” Her use of softness and close-ups is now considered groundbreaking. Cameron’s approach to the print was controversial as well. She was early to realize that darkroom interpretation was part of what made photographers artists. She remained indifferent to cracks or marks, possibly even welcoming them, and refused to discard damaged works. Her radical acceptance of the process anticipated future deconstructions of the photographic theater.
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Cameron’s concepts were also unconventional. Assuming from the start what would take over a century to be generally accepted, she ignored the argument that photography is inferior to drawing or painting because it is a mechanical and chemical process. Cameron understood that all art is intention, the image is a thing in itself, and the human spirit can be expressed by hand or by eye. Beyond her pioneering portraits, Cameron’s other pictures were unapologetic attempts to turn life into myth. She staged scenes from the Bible, classical mythology, Renaissance painting, English literature, and famously helped her friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson breathe new life into Arthurian legend by illustrating his poetry. Cameron believed that photography could transcend reality, and she repeatedly used the same models, props, and drapery to make her point. The art establishment considered these tableaux to be in poor taste, and it took until the 1980s for them to be positively reassessed.
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One of Julia Margaret Cameron's primary aims was to immortalize. She saw that, by holding images of people in time, photography offered an afterlife — a divine art that aligned with her religious faith. Cameron’s methods cut to the heart of photography’s strange magic, prefiguring Pictorialist aesthetics, Surrealist photography as imaginal tool, and snapshot artists such as Nan Goldin, who sacrifice technical perfection for intimacy. Arresting Beauty is an accessible volume drawn from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s holdings, the most extensive collection of her photographs in the world. It introduces new viewers, or invites those already familiar, to appreciate Cameron’s intent to “electrify you with delight and startle the world.”
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