Met Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron

In portraits taken by Henry Herschel Hay and Charles Somers-Cocks, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron appears the quintessential Victorian matron.  Middle aged and a bit dowdy, she seems to embody perfectly the respectability and propriety of the British upper class in the late nineteenth century.  This stuffy image is only reinforced when looking at certain of her works in which she reverently attempts to recreate scenes from Tennyson and Shakespeare, a type of staged photography that today seems totally contrived and is difficult to take seriously.  One comes away with the impression of a kindly grandmother who took up photography merely as a fashionable hobby.

The current exhibit at the Met Museum succeeds very well in showing another side to Ms. Cameron.  First of all, her background was not so tediously correct as her demure portraits might suggest.  As one wall text states:

"Julia Margaret Pattle was born in Calcutta in 1815, the fourth of ten children of Adeline de l’Etang and James Pattle, an official in the East India Company whose riotous life earned him the nicknames 'Jim Blazes' and 'the biggest liar in India.' Perhaps from him she inherited a strong will and a disregard for convention."

More importantly, Ms. Cameron was a pioneer in the creation of a photographic style that went far beyond the Victorian convention of staged photographs as it attempted to raise photography to the level of other visual arts.  When given her first camera as a present at age 48, photography was less than a quarter century old and still practiced exclusively by men. Nevertheless, in spite of the restrictions imposed by age and gender, Ms. Cameron showed a great deal of innovation in approaching her craft.  Under the influence of her mentor David Wilkie Wynfield, she anticipated the Photo Secession and the work of Alfred Stieglitz by several decades in her use of soft focus (sometimes even slightly out of focus) and long exposures to achieve a more expressive body of work.  In fact, Stieglitz later reproduced many of her photos in Camera Work.

Many of the photos on display are portraits of Ms. Cameron's notable friends, neighbors and acquaintances.  These include Tennyson, Carlyle, Julia Jackson (mother of Virginia Woolf), the violinist Joseph Joachim and John Herschel (who collaborated with Talbot in the invention of photography).  To me, though, the most interesting photograph shown is that entitled After Perugino / The Annunciation.  This is a tableau where two female figures are placed opposite one another with a bouquet of lilies between them.  While the flowers are in sharp focus, the two figures, even though on the same plane as the flowers, are not themselves sharp.  I assume Ms. Cameron here deliberately used a long exposure with the knowledge that the figures' movements during the time shutter was open would make them seem slightly out of focus to the viewer.  The result is visually arresting.

The exhibit continues through January 5, 2014.