Contemporaries described her photographic work this way:

* will do better when she has learned the proper use of her apparatus
* dreadfully opposed to photographic conventions and proprieties
* daring originality but at the expense of all other photographic qualities

Her pictures were often out of focus, she dressed her female models in outlandish costumes, and she tried to capture the immortal souls of her male models. But Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the few photographers from the age of Queen Victoria who are still remembered.

Cameron was born Julia Pattle in Calcutta in 1815. Her father was a British official of the East India Company, and her mother was a French aristocrat. When Julia was 23, she met and eventually married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta. Charles was 20 years her senior.

Ten years later Charles retired and the Cameron family moved from India to England. In 1860, when Julia was 45 years old, they bought an estate on the Isle of Wight, where her neighbors included Darwin, Longfellow, Keats, Browning, Swinburne, Herschel, Dickens, and Tennyson.

She took up photography by pure chance. Charles was away on a business trip and Julia was lonely. Her eldest daughter gave her a camera as a gift: “This may amuse you, mother, in your solitude.” Julia immediately became a zealot who saw herself on a mission to “arrest all beauty” that came before her camera's lens.

But first she had to learn how to operate the camera and work in the darkroom so she asked for help from two of her neighbors, Oscar Rejlander and Charles Dodgson. Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was known not only for Alice In Wonderland but also for his photographs of little girls.

When Cameron eventually began making photographs, Tennyson supplied her with famous subjects. In addition to her famous sitters, she enlisted friends, family, servants, and even passers-by and dressed them up to illustrate religious, literary, poetic and mythological subjects.

Each of the several themes that dominate Cameron’s work arose either from personal circumstances or was a reflection of the time she lived in. All of her artistic life she seemed obsessed with the idea of capturing ideal or universal beauty in her subjects.

Where did this seeming obsession with beauty come from? Julia was one of seven sisters. Six of the sisters were known for their looks. They were given nicknames that described their appearance such as “beauty.” Julia was plain-looking and was given the nickname “talent.” A contemporary described the adult Julia as “a terrifying apparition, short and squat with none of the Pattle grace and beauty about her....”

To achieve her goal of capturing the ideal beauty of her subjects, that is, to remove the warts and give the viewer a sense of timelessness, Cameron developed the use of soft focus. Originally she did this by mistake. “…my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. When focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus …”

The other dominant themes in her work came from her environment. She was a true daughter of the Victorian Age. As such she readily accepted both the prevailing English concept of religion and the belief that men and women had different destinies.

Cameron took her religion seriously. To her and her contemporaries the term “high art” meant Christian art. She believed that she had a moral duty to show the immortality of her subjects. One of her Isle of Wight neighbors, C. Jabez Hughes, wrote, “When deep and earnest minds, seeking to express their ideas of Moral and Religious Beauty, employ High Art Photography, then may we be proud of our glorious art, and of having aided in its elevation.” He might well have had Cameron in mind as he composed these thoughts.

As for men versus women, well, everyone knew that men and women had different roles in life. Men were put here to achieve, women to serve. This view was best stated by the poet Coventry Patmore. In 1854 he published The Angel in the House, a poem about his wife Emily, whom he saw as the perfect Victorian wife. The Angel in the House was extremely popular and came to define Victorian womanhood. Here is an excerpt.

Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes.

Women were long-suffering heroines. They were eternally tender. Wives were saints and mothers madonnas.

While many of Cameron’s photographs of women are sentimental, she describes her photographs of men as follows: “When I have had such [accomplished] men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.”

Cameron wasn’t interested in the technical part of photography. At a time when this was very important, Cameron was a very poor technician. Her negatives show uneven coating (this was when each photographer had to make his own) and dust particles. Many of her pictures are faded. Her prints are streaked.

Julia Margaret Cameron died more than 125 years ago. Her technique left much to be desired, and she didn’t accept the contemporary view of what a photograph should look like. But her photographs are still studied and still admired.