photography
HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON on the Victorian lady who invented the close-up
Short and plump, Julia Margaret Cameron was the ugly duckling of a famously good-looking brood of sisters, and spent her life in pursuit of Beauty. "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me," she is often quoted as saying. "And at length the longing has been satisfied."
Julia was born in colonial Calcutta in 1815. By the time photography was invented, she had already made a sensible marriage to Charles Hay Cameron, a barrister 20 years her senior. They set up home in India; it would be another two decades before she was to own a camera, a gift from her daughter and son-in-law to ward off solitude.
By the time she had created a portrait that satisfied her, Julia was a middle-aged mother of six. Gleefully entitled Annie, My First Success, the photograph is a three-quarter profile of a serious-looking child gazing into the distance. A wan January light fleshes out her round-cheeked prettiness and haloes her neatly parted mop of hair. Annie Wilhelmina Philpot's precocious poise betrays no hint of boredom, but Julia's triumph took seven hours to realise.
Over the decade or so that followed, Julia produced a prolific portfolio of portraits, transforming the greenhouse and coal shed of her home on the Isle of Wight into a studio and darkroom, and bridging the divide between amateur and professional, artist and technician. More than a century after her death, 120 of her most important images have been assembled by Colin Ford at the National Portrait Gallery for the first major retrospective.
Seven-year-old Annie was succeeded by subjects both starry and anonymous. The presence of her famous friend and neighbour, Lord Tennyson, drew troupes of sightseers to the island, many of whom were badgered into posing for portraits or standing alongside Julia's own reluctant family and staff in elaborate tableaux, dressed as madonnas, May queens, angels or nymphs.
Julia moved in a bohemian circle that anticipated the Bloomsbury set. Her pictures have become the definitive portraits of friends such as John Herschel, the photography buff credited with coining the word "snapshot"; Tennyson referred to her characterful portrait of him as "The Dirty Monk".
The "beauty" that her portraits capture is very particular, full of allusions to classical mythology and heavily indebted to the pre-Raphaelite movement. Her men are heroic, wild-eyed and regal, while her women are droopy, melancholic creatures, invariably draped in velvet.
Some of the haunting glory of these photographs results from the technology of the time. The long exposure meant that smiling was out of the question, and explains her sitters' dreamy, faraway expressions. Even so, Cameron's distinctive artistic characteristics are evident in her very first success.
Many claim that she invented the close-up, an extraordinary achievement, given the equipment. Annie's head and shoulders almost fill the frame, investing her child's personage with a dramatic air. You see the slightly softened focus that Julia claimed she hit upon by accident; the handling of light to mollify rather than sharpen the image; and the hair, already tousled. Peering out through her soft focus, and the odd ghostly streak of collodion, her subjects remind us of the magic of photography.
When Julia Margaret Cameron started out, photography was a fledgling art, hardly recognised at all in many quarters -- including the National Portrait Gallery. Early on, artists used it as a short cut, making a photograph instead of a sketch, and Julia herself deferred to this hierarchy, often echoing the composition of Renaissance paintings or portraits by contemporary artists. Ironically, in her more ambitious tableaux, it is the realness of her medium, that very attribute for which it was so celebrated, that lets her down.
In her unfinished autobiography, Annals of My Glass House, Julia describes how she would dash indoors to show her ever-supportive and invalid husband each new success, trailing her cocktail of lethal chemicals over the household furnishings. In many accounts, she cuts a faintly risible figure, ripe for sending up by her great-niece Virginia Woolf in a one-act play. And yet tempting though it is to view her as a dilettante and lady of leisure, or to sneer at her attempts to make her costly hobby pay, it is of such bourgeois vignettes that so much of women's history is made up.
Julia Margaret Cameron set out to "arrest all beauty", but what she achieved, instead, was portraits of arrested beauty. In our own age of instant picture messaging and photo finishes, it seems strange to think of her arranging lissom young girls, fidgety toddlers and crotchety old men, stilling them for the ten minutes it took her to preserve their images. All that hair -- the men's prophetic beards, the girls' pre-Raphaelite tresses -- might almost have grown while they sat there before stout Mrs Cameron and her hulking camera, waiting on posterity.
"Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th-century photographer of genius" is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020 7306 0055) until 26 May
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A dramatic air: Annie, My First Success (1864)
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By Hephzibah Anderson and Lisa Allardice, Arts Editor
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