Photography: At last, writes Patricia Craig, the full range of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographic feats can be experienced. Her biography and the Complete Photographs have been published to coincide with the current Cameron exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Virginia Woolf's play Freshwater, put on for the delectation of friends and relatives at her sister Vanessa Bell's studio in 1935, was a kind of parody of their own Bloomsbury group with all its intimacies and absurdities. The play, subtitled "A Comedy", is centred on a forerunner of Bloomsbury itself.
Freshwater (on the Isle of Wight) denotes a no less dazzling assembly of friends, fellow-artists and personages, all luminaries of the Victorian age. Tennyson, with his wife and sons, was the first to settle at Freshwater Bay; and around him gathered an illustrious entourage: poets, scholars, famous female beauties, churchmen, artists and whatnot, along with Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, renowned both for her eccentricities and expertise, who photographed them all.
Cameron's eccentricities were well to the fore in the biographical essay - also by Woolf - which accompanied the selection of her work issued under the title Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women in 1926. "She had little respect . . . for the conventions of Putney," her great-niece wrote. "Dressed in robes of flowing red velvet, she walked with her friends, stirring a cup of tea as she walked, half-way to the railway station in hot summer weather."
Red velvet does not seem suitable for the time of year; however, Cameron was used to much greater heat than that of Putney. Born in 1815 in an affluent suburb of Calcutta, Julia Margaret Pattle (as she then was), one of seven striking sisters, had married Charles Hay Cameron, a Benthamite jurist on the Supreme Council of India, and 20 years her senior, in 1838. Once he had retired, and the colonial Camerons had returned to England, the bulk of their income came from his coffee plantations in Ceylon, and it wasn't adequate. They were plagued by money worries for the rest of their lives.
Nevertheless, in 1860, Julia Margaret managed to scrape up the funds to acquire two adjacent houses on the Isle of Wight, near her friend the poet laureate's Farringford. Three years later - the story goes - the gift of a camera from her daughter and son-in-law set her off on the course which would make her name.
Actually, as Virginia Olsen's exhaustive and illuminating new biography shows, her interest in the budding art of photography did not occur as suddenly as all that. However, the felicitious present certainly activated her creative impulse to the fullest degree. A coalhouse was quickly converted into a darkroom and a chicken coop turned into a photographic studio ("The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten").
Then, early in 1864, came a breakthrough. "Annie - my first success" is a slightly out-of-focus, but vividly alive impression of a bright-eyed eight-year-old with untidy hair and wearing a buttoned-up sealskin coat.
Photography was not an easy business at the time, either for the practitioner or the sitter. The technical process involved a heavy glass plate, coated in collodion, which was placed in a camera resting on a tripod and exposed for up to five minutes. During this time, Cameron, by sheer force of will, imposed immobility on her suffering subjects. No one enjoyed being photographed, but most potential sitters were caught up in the photographer's irresistible enthusiasm.
There were exceptions. Occasionally Julia Margaret's dramatic gestures misfired. She failed to capture one visiting statesman (Garibaldi) who, as she fell to her knees raising filthy hands to implore him to sit for her, mistook her for a beggarwoman and brushed her aside. Often she was driven to lurking near her doorway, ready to pounce on any likely looking subject who might pass by.
The anecdotes multiplied, but so - fortunately - did the photographs. This was no flibbertigibbet but a dedicated professional and innovator whose work survives as a testimony to her artistry and assiduity. Her series of hieratic portraits - of Tennyson, Darwin, Longfellow, Browning, Carlyle, Sir John William Frederick Herschel and so on - achieves an almost hypnotic density, making their images archaic and "modern" at the same time. These famous men had their counterparts in the radiant women, pre-Raphaelite in their 1860s picturesqueness, conscripted as models: maidservants Mary Hillier and Mary Ryan; young relatives including May Prinsep, Julia Jackson Duckworth (later to be the mother of Virginia Woolf), Katie and Lizzie Keown; Ellen Terry. Even the posed tableaux, illustrating such works as Tennyson's Idylls of the King, with their tinsel and draperies smacking of amateur theatricals - for which Cameron was persistently derided ("childish trivialities", Shaw called them) distil, for viewers of the present, a sense of enchanted artifice.
It was time for a reassessment of Julia Margaret Cameron, and the Olsen biography, with its painstaking detail and sound historical sense, helps to bring its subject more sharply into focus, with all her passionate energy and endearing imperiousness.
But it is the Complete Photographs which will enhance her reputation for many years to come.
In her preface, Virginia Olsen pays tribute to the pioneering researches of Julian Cox and Colin Ford, to whom, indeed, all Cameron enthusiasts must be indebted. Their magnificent catalogue raisonné, which contains over 1,300 illustrations, many full-page and some in duo-tone, is a breathtaking work of scholarship and appreciation.
Now, at last, we can marvel at the full range of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographic feats. Both books, the biography and the Complete Photographs, are published to coincide with the current Cameron exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London (until May 26th), curated by Colin Ford, who is also responsible for the accompanying catalogue (Julia Margaret Cameron: The First Great Woman Photographer, £40). As a visual experience, the effect is stunning - a perfect encapsulation of the light of other days.
Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore was published last year by Bloomsbury
Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs. By Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Thames & Hudson, 560 pp, £95.
From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography. By Victoria Olsen, Arum Press, 320 pp, £20.