the dilettante’s lensLore alexa lawrence

When photography was in its infancy, most of the photographers were men and reasons went beyond

19th century sexism. The equipment of the time was heavy, bulky, and required strength to carry around.

And to develop a picture, photographers became chemists, working with dangerous solutions to create

a picture.

So it was all the more remarkable when in 1863 a 48-year-old wife and mother received a camera as a gift and began an intense 11-year career that produced some of the most notable pictures of the Victorian era. Julia Margaret Cameron veered away from the

common artistic outlet for women of her class – painting – and entered the exotic world of

photography. It was an innate match.

-Julia Margaret Cameron

“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour and it has become to me as a living thing, with

voice and memory and creative vigour,”

Cameron threw herself into her new vocation with the professional’s

passion. Drawing upon the artists and intellectuals she met at her sister’s London salon, Cameron

launched a career by photographing celebrities of the day, including the poet Robert Browning, artist and

designer Edward Burne-Jones, scientist Charles Darwin; painter John Everett Millais, writer and

critic William Michael Rossetti, poet Lord Alfred Tennyson, actress Ellen

Terry, and painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts. Aside from bringing her renown, the portraits

of eminent Victorians remain a vital photographic record of the era. Lord Alfred Tennyson, photographed by Cameron in 1870

Cameron also branched out into creating photographic illustrations from scenes in

literature, most notably Tennyson’s Idylls of the

King. Although today they appear stiff and posed, at

the time they were modeled after paintings.

Elaine, of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, as captured by Cameron (1874)

Although Cameron, who died young at age 63 in Sri Lanka, was not the only female photographer of her

time, she was unquestionably the best known and most influential of her gender.