Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the pioneers of photography. She lived and worked when the art was new and she also knew a lot of influential and famous people so her vast collection of photographs is very important. In this book the authors Lisa Springer and Marta Weiss try to explain what Cameron was trying to achieve and they use a lot of photographs to illustrate her life and work.
The sub-title of this book is Arresting Beauty and that sums up Cameron’s career. She tried to find and capture beauty as she saw it. Her photographs can be grouped together to show the ways in which she worked. See she considered faces beautiful and so she took portraits of famous people and of others. She found that children’s bodies displayed beauty and innocence so she photographed naked children – something which we might have more of a problem with today. She found beauty in the exotic and so she looked for people from different traditions to photograph or dressed her models in foreign clothes. She also used modern models to recreate scenes from the past, the Bible and mythology which she found worthy. She touched up the photographic plates and used lighting to create effects and depict the beauty that she saw. Her vision of beauty is very powerful in her work.
This book is an excellent introduction to the photographer’s work and is especially helpful because so many of her photographs are reproduced. I am not an expert in art or the history of photography and this book was pitched exactly right for me. It was clear and interesting and the text illuminated the illustrations.
Anne Is Reading 