Here is a snapshot, taken from a time before the snap. It comes from the journal of William Allingham, in 1867:
If you wanted to distill the practices of mid-Victorian culture into a single day, you could hardly do better than that. The Irish-born Allingham was a minor poet and, fortunately for us, a first-rate literary groupie. Notice how his diary entry is framed in pastoral: roses and campions at the start, hay at the end. Within that warmth and fragrance, though, is an unmistakable sense of civic bustle, urged along by social beckonings, pert interrogation, and various forms of transport. As for the sovereign figure at its heart, dropping names like petals all around her, who is she? How many queens could England be expected to sustain?
Well, her full name was Julia Margaret Cameron, and, thanks to a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can ponder some of her legacy—slim but potent pickings from a capacious body of work. You may have other things to do, but, as Allingham demonstrates, the lady in question brooked no excuses, and was constitutionally incapable of taking no for an answer. You can be sure that anybody who was described by Carlyle as infernal must have been hot to handle, since Carlyle himself was amply supplied with fire and brimstone, plus a temper as short as a candlewick. The joke is that, even as Cameron complained to Allingham, her powers of persuasion had already prevailed. Carlyle had sat for her at last, and was bemused by the result: “It is as if suddenly the picture began to speak, terrifically ugly and woe-begone, but has something of a likeness.” At the Met, you can see a product of that session: a great well of shadow, in which one half of the writer’s face is drowned. And what we instantly notice about the other half, with its lonely eye and its salty shock of hair, is how it shudders and blurs. Is that, as some of Cameron’s contemporaries believed, a mistake: the lack of a proper technique that would embalm the subject in tranquillity? Or is it what Carlyle called a likeness, bodying forth a spirit that—as his affrighted readers knew—would not, and could not, hold still? Time does not freeze in such a photograph. It melts and steams.
Something else strikes you about the Carlyle picture. It breeds a suspicion that impatience and restiveness belong not just to the man in front of the camera but to the woman behind it, as if she could barely wait to press ahead, like an explorer, and make the next discovery. And so it was; energy clung to Cameron from first to last. Born days before Napoleon’s final defeat, in 1815, and dying a few weeks before the birth of Einstein, in 1879, she conducted herself as if wishing to prove, to the relevant authorities, that a single lifetime was an insultingly brief span, in the light of all that needed and begged to be achieved. No surprise, perhaps, to learn that she was a child of Empire: a Briton born in Calcutta, like Thackeray, and blessed, like him, with an eye that always looked askance—or, at least, from unconventional angles, and without fear—upon the country that both had to learn to call home.
Her father, James Pattle, was in the Indian Civil Service; her mother, Adeline de l’Étang, was French and famously beautiful. That blessing lingered, and spread down the generations, gracing all but one of the Pattles’ seven daughters. (The sixth, Virginia, once had to sneak out of a shop in Oxford Street, in London, by the side entrance, so large was the throng that had gathered outside just to gaze upon her.) Needless to say, the exception was Julia, who, denied the chance to revel in loveliness, embarked upon a mission to create it. “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me,” she wrote in a fragment of memoir. The siblings, far from being sundered by rivalry, remained tightly knit through the years, so much so that one wag—it may have been Thackeray—coined the word “Pattledom” to describe their collective impact. It verged on the formidable, not helped by the fact that, once the sisters were grown up and settled in England, they often continued to converse among themselves in Hindustani.
Julia’s life, typical for a child of her background, was one of shuttling—borne back to Europe by her mother at the age of three or four, and educated (or, at least, allowed to bloom) in those healthier climes. Less typically, she spent part of her youth in Versailles, in the care of her French grandmother. Not until 1834, on the brink of adulthood, did she return to India. From there, two years on, she travelled to South Africa for the repair of ill health. In 1838, she returned to Calcutta with a fiancé, Charles Hay Cameron, a distinguished jurist, who, with Thomas Macaulay, had drafted a new Indian penal code, and who was to become the legal member of the Supreme Council of India. Few posts were more prestigious. He and his wife spent a decade in Calcutta, at the crest of Anglo-Indian society, and raised a family. Following the custom, and in terror of disease, Julia repeatedly sent her own children to live with relatives in England, not without agonies of separation. In 1848, the Camerons sailed to England, making one home after another there before settling in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast. Yet even that was not their last act. In 1875, as if heeding a call, they made their way back, coming to rest in Ceylon, as it was then known, where Charles owned coffee estates. “Think of us in a little hut with only mud walls,” Julia wrote. A tame stag is said to have guarded the door.
Within this peregrination, there were other movements, smaller but twice as frantic. Even by the standards of the time, Cameron was indefatigable. In Calcutta, she raised the astounding sum of fourteen thousand pounds for the relief of the Irish famine. In England, where she continued to swathe herself in Oriental silks and serve curry, there was no resisting her centripetal force. The poet Sir Henry Taylor and his wife, the Camerons’ close friends, suffered the full onslaught of Julia’s generosity: according to Taylor, “She keeps showering upon us her ‘barbaric pearls and gold,’—India shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, &c.” Taking your leave was no easy task—on one occasion, Julia accompanied a guest on foot to the railroad station, stirring a cup of tea along the way—and, when you were far from her, the attentions only multiplied. She once admitted to having written ninety-nine letters in a fortnight, and it was not unknown for her to race after the postman with a donkey and cart. Then, there was Dimbola, the family stronghold, in Freshwater, where the next-door neighbors were the Tennysons. Julia addressed the Poet Laureate by his first name, and vice versa. Once, when he refused to be vaccinated against smallpox, she stood at the foot of his stairs and cried, “You’re a coward, Alfred, a coward!” Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the novelist’s daughter, recalled that “Mrs. Cameron seemed to be omnipresent—organising happy things, summoning one person and another, ordering all the day and long into the night, for of an evening came impromptu plays and waltzes in the wooden ballroom, and young partners dancing under the stars.” It sounds exhausting, and one sympathizes with the visitor who, overwhelmed by the writers and painters who infested Dimbola, asked, “Is there nobody commonplace?”
In 1863, however, there was a lull. Charles was away in Ceylon, as were two of the couple’s sons. Julia was lonely (“I assume vivacity of manner for my own sake as well as for others,” she said, in a gust of candor), and one of her daughters gave her a present to keep her spirits up, adding, “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude.” The gift was a camera. She was forty-eight years old.
Being given a camera, in the eighteen-sixties, especially if you were a woman, was like being given a new Mini nowadays: the latest boxy object, practical and fun (“It may amuse you”), lending dash to your existence and allowing you to see more of your friends. What Cameron got, in fact, was two wooden boxes, one of which slid inside the other, with a French lens of fixed aperture. Images were recorded on a heavy, rectangular glass plate—the film of its day—measuring eleven inches by nine. In 1866, when the bug had bitten deep, she upgraded to an even bulkier piece of kit, which took plates of fifteen by twelve. Not only would a Mini be easier to operate. It would be easier to carry.
The mechanics of early photography may seem arduous, but they were hyper-refined when compared with the chemistry. Using the wet collodion process, which had been devised in 1851, and of which Cameron availed herself with predictable eagerness, was about as easy as running a laboratory on a waterslide, against the clock. Collodion is a flammable syrup; you poured it onto the plate, tipping this way and that to glaze the surface. One hitch with collodion is that it loses sensitivity after ten minutes, so you had to work fast. You dipped the plate in a solution of silver nitrate, and, while it was still wet, exposed it. (This was the bit we call art.) Next came development—another chemical coating, evenly applied. The plate had to be rinsed, dried, held in front of a flame “as hot as the hand will bear,” carefully varnished, washed again, and dried. To make a print from it, you submerged paper in two solutions, one of egg white, and one of silver nitrate; no enlargement was needed, so the paper was placed flat against the negative, exposed to sunlight, then washed and dried. To be fancy, you could tone it with gold chloride. Chickens also came in handy, for the eggs.
Helmut Gernsheim, whose groundbreaking 1948 survey of Cameron was inspired by seeing her work on the walls of a country railroad station, is somewhat lofty on the topic of wet collodion. “It was a great misfortune that Mrs. Cameron’s manual dexterity did not equal her artistic vision,” he writes. The technical term for this is “hooey.” There is no denying the blemishes, blots, and spots that pepper her work, but do they invalidate it, and coarsen its effect? For one thing, they are a touching reminder of the trial and error that beset any photographer of the period, especially one as headlong as Cameron. “I felt my way literally in the dark thro’ endless failures,” she stated in a letter of February, 1864. Her hands, not to mention her table linen, grew black and brown with chemicals, among them potassium cyanide, used to remove excess developer. She persevered, printing a negative that more finicky artists would have thrown away. One of her best-known images from that year, a portrait of the teen-age actress Ellen Terry, entitled “Sadness,” was patched up, rephotographed, and reissued in 1875, but I prefer the original (the J. Paul Getty Museum has a fine example), with a gaping black triangle in the lower half where the collodion peeled away from the glass. It tells us what Cameron believed was worth preserving, and what wounds could be borne in that cause. Similarly, at the Met, look at “Sappho” (1865), in which one of her housemaids, Mary Hillier, is posed in profile, wearing a richly embroidered dress, and you will witness a torn white line running from the left-hand border, imprinted by an angry crack in the plate. Do we think the less of this study in dignity, or do we see past such flaws, or through them, much as we accept them in somebody we love?
Then, there is the fuzzy matter of focus. Nothing in Cameron’s legacy is fought over with more gusto (“It is not the mission of photography to produce smudges,” one thunderous rival photographer wrote), and nothing in her own pronouncements is more abrupt than the challenge she put to Sir John Herschel in a letter: “What is focus—& who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” Herschel was highly qualified to enlighten her, being not just “an illustrious and revered as well as beloved friend” and, like his father, William, a leading astronomer but also a photographic pioneer, who discovered hypo (still used as a fixer to stabilize negatives and prints), and was the first to employ the word “negative” in this sense. But Cameron, as usual, was not expecting a reply. Scorning the “definite focus” desired by other practitioners, she preferred to stop focussing when she arrived at “something which to my eye was very beautiful,” an assertion that has encouraged later commentators to wonder about her eyesight. Even when she changed cameras and switched to a lens with a movable aperture, she chose to keep it at its widest, which meant a shallow depth of field—one thin plane of focus, with everything in front of it and behind it slipping into a haze. Factor in the lengthy exposure time, which forced Cameron’s sitters to attempt immobility—described by one of them as “torture”—and you realize how precarious the search for clarity must have been. But what exactly did she wish to make clear? Her most perceptive biographer of recent years, Victoria Olsen, gets the balance right: “Cameron could make perfectly focused images but she did not always want to.”
Herschel himself sat for Cameron, over two days in 1867. In one shot, she homed in on the most precise of focal points: the stubble on the old man’s chin. (Too wise for vanity, he said that it “beats hollow everything I ever liked in photography before.”) The Met has two more results from that sitting, very like one another, and less sharp. The rheumy eyes that have seen stars—Herschel had already published his “General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars”—are the lens’s target, yet, despite being viewed not through a telescope but from a few feet away, they are in a mist. Herschel is encumbered with no props; nothing gives a clue to his labors or a hint of his formal eminence. All we have is a face, emerging from blackness and staring at us with gentle perplexity, sad and unsevere, as though inquiring into the origin of our species. As Cameron wrote to a friend, “The history of the human face is a book we don’t tire of, if we can get its grand truths, & learn them by heart.” A white neckerchief encircles the sage’s throat, rhyming with the messy halo, like a solar flare, around his head. The happiest rumor surrounding this majestic photograph is that its maker prepared the way, shortly beforehand, by getting the great man to wash his hair.
The theme of greatness, and the earnest representation of those who enshrine it, may leave us confused and embarrassed, but to the Victorians it was an unblushing pursuit. It had a political tinge, felt most keenly in Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History,” published in 1841; if you fear the crowd, and the disorders it can wreak, what better recourse than to highlight the man who stands out from it? Little of that anxiety filters into Cameron’s photographs, and yet, however avidly she hunted down the great and the good, and bullied them into a pose, there remains something both intimate and unreachable in their seclusion. “When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man,” she wrote. The prints, sold through a London dealer, were inscribed by her with the words “From life,” but her private hopes were higher: “They are not only from the Life but to the Life and startle the Eye with wonder & delight.” The list of those she snared goes on and on, and includes Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Trollope, Darwin, the classicist Benjamin Jowett, the violinist Joseph Joachim, and the painters G. F. Watts and William Holman Hunt, who may well have asked themselves if they were being exalted or usurped by the lady with the large wooden box.
If so, they were right to worry. In 1874, Watts painted a woman named Julia Duckworth: stiff and snooty, dead around the eyes, with a neck suggesting that she may have fed on the topmost leaves of trees. She appears again, five years on, as Mary, looking very lost and wan, in “The Annunciation,” by Edward Burne-Jones, a leading light of the later Pre-Raphaelites. But if you want to know what she was like—who she was, you might say, and how intense the force field of her appeal might have been—you must consult the pictures taken of her by Cameron, who happened to be her aunt. There are more than fifty of them, and the Met has two on display. The first, dating from 1867, when she was Julia Jackson, is full-face, dramatically lit from one side; her loosened hair flows over her shoulders, she boasts no adornment, and the head-on look she delivers is so unflinching that it verges on the brazen. Compare this with what Burne-Jones made of her—a human column, marble-cold, drained of breath and blood—and you start to realize that the inroads made by photography into the realm of painting, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were more like raids. Though the backdrop may be sepia and moody, the subject is alert in her modernity and ravenous for experience. You could post her on Instagram right now.
The second Cameron image of Duckworth at the Met is a more sober affair. She gazes offstage, trim and pensive, beads aglitter on the neckline of her dress. She is entirely ravishing, and, more important, she reminds you of someone: her daughter, Virginia Woolf. We owe thanks to Woolf, for it was partly her efforts that summoned the life and work of her great-aunt—which, after she died, had waned from fashion—back into view. In 1926, Woolf and Roger Fry, her Bloomsbury confrère, wrote introductions to a book of Cameron’s pictures, called “Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women.” The title makes you wince; it may be accurate, since, apart from Terry, none of the female subjects were celebrities, but it still seems like a curious hangover of moral distinctions that Woolf, by dint of her generation and her gender, was determined to shake off. Her tribute is poised between fellow feeling and light lampoon. Cameron, though “magnificently uncompromising about her art,” had once toyed with other arts, less suited to her talent, and even, Woolf informs us, “finished enough of a novel to make Sir Henry Taylor very nervous lest he should be called upon to read the whole of it.” Indeed, so entertained was the genuine novelist by the whirligig of her forebear’s social mania, especially on the Isle of Wight, that she also wrote a play on the subject—a surreal semi-farce entitled “Freshwater,” first performed in 1935, which is roughly as amusing as you would expect a farce by Virginia Woolf to be.
In one respect, the mockery was well earned. No artist who brews “Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effects,” as Cameron labelled some of her pictures, deserves to escape unscathed. There was a theatrical element to Victorian aesthetics that has weathered badly; it would take a brave producer, these days, to stage one of Tennyson’s plays, such as “Becket.” Nonetheless, it was true to the times that, in 1874, the poet suggested to Cameron that they collaborate. “Idylls of the King,” his long sequence of narrative poems on King Arthur and his knights, was already a popular success, and Tennyson believed that, were his neighbor to provide photographic illustrations for a new edition of the verse, both of them might profit from the venture. Cameron hurled herself into it, press-ganging relatives, house guests, servants, and anyone else she knew—or, if necessary, didn’t know—into dressing up in faux-courtly outfits and adopting appropriately medieval gestures for the camera. Most vexing of all was her quest for the ideal Lancelot, which reached an unlikely impasse when she and Tennyson met Bishop Vaughan, perhaps the most high-minded Catholic prelate of the age. “Alfred, I have found Sir Lancelot,” the photographer exclaimed, to which the poet replied, “I want a face well worn with evil passion.” In the end, the job went to a porter at Cameron’s local pier.
Even as we laugh at the Victorians, however, we should take care, for they seldom hesitated to laugh at themselves, and our own hilarity can be the merest echo. (Moreover, away from comedy, they trounce us; jeer as we may at their reluctance to ruminate on sex, at least in detail, they would be utterly bewildered at our inability to talk about death.) The most famous portrayal of Tennyson, which is in the Met show, was created by Cameron, in 1865, and used as a frontispiece to “Idylls of the King.” And the poet’s response? He dubbed it “The Dirty Monk.” As for the folderol at Freshwater, Woolf was not the first to smile at its pretensions. That honor goes to the photographer’s husband, who found almost everything funny. Blessed with long, rime-white locks and beard, Charles had the misfortune to be ready-made for historical reconstruction, and so it is that we find him, on the walls of the Met, pretending to be Merlin and King Lear. As the former, he stands before a hollow oak, as the poem demands; the tree was hauled in and set up by the gardener, whereupon a problem arose. In the words of one onlooker, “It was more than mortal could stand to see the oak beginning gently to vibrate, and know that the extraordinary phenomenon was produced by the suppressed chuckling of Merlin.”
The Lear picture, from 1872, is another matter. Charles, complete with coronet, is in position, keeping a laudably straight face and grasping what is meant to be a regal sceptre, or staff, but may well be the fireplace poker. The outcome, despite everything, is not wholly absurd; there is a distracted magic to its air of ceremony, and visitors to the Met will be gratified to learn that this particular print was owned by Maurice Sendak. (Who makes the most of his crown and mace if not Max, among the wild things?) In need of daughters for Lear, Cameron turned to the Liddell sisters, among them Alice—already possessed of immortality, thanks to her fictional counterpart in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s book had appeared seven years previously, and seven years before that he had photographed Alice as a beggar maid, or working-class minx, in off-the-shoulder rags. That picture gives us grave disquiet, and the most robust response to it, also at the Met, is the one that Cameron took of her, in 1872, allotting it the title “Pomona,” the goddess of abundance. Alice is alone, though girt with leaves and flowers, like a visual match for the roses and hay in William Allingham’s journal. She stands with hand on hip, not in coy flirtation, as Carroll might dream of, but because she is taking no nonsense—an impression confirmed by the steady blaze in her eyes, with their arched brows. Farewell to the girlish innocent, primed to be a victim or a dupe. She is her own woman, and we are her looking glass.
Tastes will shift again, no doubt, but right now, and on the evidence of the Met’s exhibit, this is what we value in the Cameron inheritance: the shock, and the privilege, of being looked at by persons from another time. They are clusters and nebulae—physically faded now, yet no less dazzling to the imagination than when they were first observed. The young woman photographed by Cameron in 1866, and boosted with a caption from Milton (“The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty”), should by rights be a ghost, peering from the depths of her damaged gloom; and yet, as Herschel said, in awe, “she is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air.” That mixture of romance and mug shot is threaded through Cameron’s portraits, and her concocted scenes of myth and legend are, similarly, suffused with sincerity and play alike. To that extent, she upheld the peculiar standards of her era, but in other ways she kept them at bay. Contrary to the promises of her daughter, the camera did not amuse her, in ladylike ease, as a fitting diversion for an amateur; it consumed her, firing a career and a faith. She neither resented nor ever relinquished her duties as a wife and mother, and was, in Woolf’s words, “like a tigress where her children were concerned”; she threatened to colonize other people like a one-woman empire. But the fact remains that, when her vocation arrived, in middle age, all her zest and enterprise, far from being frittered away, was driven to a concentrated point. Julia Margaret Cameron found her focus. ♦
