Historical Photographer: Constructed Reality - Julia Margaret Cameron

After receiving a camera as a gift, Julia Margaret Cameron began her career in photography at the age of forty-eight. She produced the majority of her work from her home at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. By the coercive force of her eccentric personality, she enlisted everyone around her as models, from family members to domestic servants and local residents.

The wife of a retired jurist, Cameron moved in the highest circles of society in Victorian England. She photographed the intellectuals and leaders within her circle of family and friends, among them the portrait painter George Frederick Watts, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She derived much of her subject inspiration from literature, and her work in turn influenced writers. In addition to literature, she drew her subject matter from the paintings of Raphael, Giotto, and Michelangelo, whose works she knew through prints that circulated widely in late nineteenth-century England. Summing up her influences, Cameron stated her photographic mission thus: "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty." -http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=2026

Julia Margaret Cameron
British, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 1865

The subject of this photograph derives from the French romantic novel Paul et Virginie of 1787, which was translated and widely read in Victorian England. The models are Freddie Gould and Elizabeth Keown, local children from the Isle of Wight, where Julia Margaret Cameron photographed. The novel centers around a shipwreck, during which the heroine must shed her clothes to be rescued; she refuses to sacrifice her modesty and drowns. Cameron does not attempt to illustrate an actual scene from the text; instead, she suggests the novel's tropical setting through a bamboo-handled parasol, scattered greenery underfoot, and the models' appropriately disheveled drapery. Cameron often took well-known works of literature or painting as inspiration for individual images and then interpreted them loosely to communicate a universal underlying theme. -from above website

I enjoy her work and that she used ordinary people as hew models to create images from novels and art. It's something that interest me since I was in the business of making costumes. I like the idea that you can completely transform someone through clothes and setting. You can make them into something else.