Julia Margaret Cameron (Calcutta, 11 giugno 1815 – Ceylon, 26 gennaio 1879) è stata una fotografa inglese, esponente del pittorialismo.
Era la figlia di James Pattle, un ufficiale inglese della British East India Company, e di Adeline de l’Etang, figlia di aristocratici francesi. Visse in Francia sino al 1838, quindi tornò in India per sposare Charles Hay Cameron. Si trasferì a Londra nel 1848 quando il marito si ritirò dagli affari. Nel 1860 la famiglia Cameron acquistò una proprietà nell’Isola di Wight dopo aver visitato la tenuta del poeta Alfred Lord Tennyson. La proprietà venne chiamata Dimbola Lodge ed ospita tuttora un museo e una mostra fotografica della Cameron.
La passione per la fotografia nacque solo nel 1863, quando ricevette in regalo una fotocamera dalla figlia Julia. L’attività fotografica conquistò la Cameron che praticò principalmente il ritratto e la rappresentazione allegorica di racconti e romanzi.
Le sue immagini incorporano l’atmosfera sognante dell’epoca vittoriana, il leggero “fuori fuoco” restituisce eterei ritratti di bambini e di donne immerse nella natura.
Tra i personaggi che passarono per l’obiettivo di Julia Margaret Cameron ci sono Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry e George Frederic Watts.
Su richiesta del poeta Alfred Lord Tennyson, Cameron illustrò il suo componimento Idilli del re (Idylls the King) utilizzando personaggi in costume.
Nel 1875 la famiglia Cameron tornò a Ceylon, ma la sua attività fotografica fu impedita dal difficile reperimento dei materiali fotografici. Nessuna fotografia di quest’ultimo periodo è giunta fino a noi.
Biografia da Wikipedia.
Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 Calcutta – 26 January 1879 Kalutara, Ceylon) was a British photographer.She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes.
Cameron’s photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Her style was not widely appreciated in her own day: her choice to use a soft focus and to treat photography as an art as well as a science, by manipulating the wet collodion process, caused her works to be viewed as “slovenly”, “mistakes” and bad photography. She found more acceptance among pre-Raphaelite artists than among photographers. Her work has influenced modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight is open to the public.
In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. She remained a member of the Photographic Society, London, until her death. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.”
“Annie, my first success”, 29 January 1864. Cameron’s first print with which she was satisfied
The basic techniques of soft-focus “fancy portraits”, which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that “to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success”.
Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer and her works.
At the time, photography was a labour-intensive art that also was highly dependent upon crucial timing. Sometimes Cameron was obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved, and leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. Other photographers strove for vastly different applications. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also left us with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.
During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron’s portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures, becoming an invaluable resource. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
The bulk of Cameron’s photographs fit into two categories—closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks, limp poses, and soft lighting.