Best-known for her powerful portrait and allegorical photographs, Julia Margaret Cameron was an innovator in both the practice and promotion of her work. She is commemorated with a blue plaque at 10 Chesham Place, Belgravia, her first home in London on arrival from India.

Julia Margaret Pattle was born in Calcutta on 11 June 1815. Her father was an East India Company official and her mother was from a French aristocratic family, so Julia and her six sisters were educated in France. The girls had Bengali ancestry on their mother’s side and spoke Hindustani as well as French and English. In France the unconventional Pattle sisters encountered Victorian artists and the writer William Makepeace Thackeray, who coined for them the affectionate name ‘Pattledom’.

In about 1836 Julia met astronomer John Herschel and learned about the invention of photography and in 1838 she married Charles Hay Cameron, a colonial administrator and reformer twenty years her senior. While Charles did judicial work, Julia acted as hostess of Government House in Calcutta, raised money for victims of the Irish potato famine, and had her translation of a romantic ballad published. 

10 Chesham Place

In 1848, the Camerons left for England. Soon after their arrival, they made a home at 10 Chesham Place, Belgravia, part of a smart stucco terrace that forms one side of a triangular London ‘square’ laid out from the early 1830s by T and L Cubitt.

In London Cameron was part of a vibrant social circle, which included many figures whom she would later photograph, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and GF Watts. In some ways this meeting of creative minds prefigured the Bloomsbury group. Julia Duckworth, mother to Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, was Cameron’s niece and goddaughter, and one of her favourite sitters.

Experiments in photography

Cameron lived in London until 1860. She had already begun to experiment with photographic practices when, in December 1863, aged 49 and now living on the Isle of Wight, she received her first box camera – a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. She later wrote:

the gift from those I loved so tenderly added more & more impulse to my deeply seated love of the beautiful & from the first moment I handled my Lens with a tender ardour & it has now become to me as a living thing with voice & memory & creative vigour Many & many a week in the year 64 I worked fruitlessly but not hopelessly

Cameron made her coal shed into a dark room and the henhouse into a space for glass plates. She produced the first image she considered a success, a portrait of young Annie Philpot, in January 1864.

In addition to taking photographs, Cameron compiled albums of her prints, registered her work with the copyright office, became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland, and exhibited her images. She won a bronze medal in London in 1865 and a gold in 1866. At the 1867 Paris Exposition, she received her greatest accolade – an honourable mention for ‘artistic photography’ and a place of honour.

Portraits, Madonnas and Fancy Subjects

By 1866 Cameron had begun creating the enigmatic portraiture for which she is best known. She grouped her photographs into ‘Portraits’, ‘Madonna Groups’ and ‘Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect’, which included literary, mythological and biblical themes. Around a quarter of her known portraits were of what she called ‘Great men’, including Charles Darwin. She demanded much of her subjects and sittings could be an ordeal.

She regularly photographed her servants in various guises, especially Mary Ryan (whom Cameron adopted as a child beggar), Mary Kellaway and Mary Hillier, in addition to her celebrity friends.

At her unconventional home studio, servants assisted with the photographic process, housework was abandoned, and guests answered the door. Alongside these blurred social boundaries and her celebration of powerful female figures, Cameron sometimes posed girls as boy characters, which some historians have also seen as transgressive. As the Daily News put it in 1926,

Mrs Cameron was a modern whose manners would have shocked even modern Chelsea or Bloomsbury, and whose art would no less surely have delighted them.

Some of Cameron’s work now makes for uncomfortable viewing. She used children as subjects, sometimes scantily clad and looking anxious. Her portrait, ‘Sadness’, captured seventeen-year-old actress Ellen Terry on the eve of her wedding to the much older GF Watts. That of Déjatch Alámayou depicted the unhappy-looking seven-year-old Abyssinian prince after his father had taken his own life rather than surrender to the British; it was taken around the time Queen Victoria summoned the little boy to Osborne.

Practice and promotion

Cameron forged her career when photography was still in its infancy. The wet collodion process (invented just over a decade before she began working) was technically difficult. Each glass plate needed to be prepared just before exposure and had to be developed immediately. The print was made onto albumen-coated paper and took two hours to expose, wash tone, dry and mount.

Cameron deliberately chose not to focus her images sharply as other photographers did, instead stopping when they appeared beautiful to her. Virginia Woolf observed that ‘her object [was] to overcome realism by diminishing just in the least degree the precision of the focus’. This approach, and her refusal to retouch images, were dismissed by some in the commercial photographic press but her work chimed with the Pre-Raphaelites, and she gained popular as well as critical acclaim.

Cameron’s first sale to a public institution came when she sold 63 prints to South Kensington Museum director Sir Henry Cole in 1865; these form the basis of today’s Cameron collection at the V&A. She acknowledged the pressure to be commercially successful, telling Cole that ‘a woman with sons to educate cannot live on fame alone!’ In 1868, the museum lent her two rooms for a portrait studio.

Later life

In the 1870s she illustrated poetic works, notably a ‘People’s’ edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1874–5). This recasting of the Arthurian legends featured her husband Charles as Merlin and was her last large-scale photographic project.

Cameron registered more than 500 of her estimated 3,000 photographs (many of which have not been traced) with the copyright office. Her last was dated 20 October 1875, not long before she and Charles left for Ceylon, where it was cheaper to live, and where Charles felt most at home.

Few of Cameron’s photographs survive from this time. Cameron died on 26 January 1879, and her husband died the following year. They were buried in the churchyard near their plantations.

References and further reading

• Helen Barlow, ‘Cameron [née Pattle], Julia Margaret (1815–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)
• Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Eds, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (2003)
• Victoria Olsen, From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian Photography (2003)