LOREN MITCHELL – S CUVPH1402A JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

BIOGRAPHY & CAREER Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta, India on June 11, Educated in France, but returned to India, and in 1838 married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to London, England. In 1860 Cameron visited poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight. Julia was taken with the location and soon after the Cameron family purchased a property on the island. Taking pictures became her hobby and later on, it transformed into her greatest passion and obsession until the last years of her life.

Another thing which differentiated Julia Margaret Cameron from other photographers was that her pictures had technical flaws. Others were taken purposely out of focus, some were soft and very picturesque. She did not take photos to earn a living which was why her craft was considered to be experimental and unconventional. In spite of this, she marked a solid place in the history of photography. She had a profound capacity to visualize and her images illuminated her chosen subjects’ personalities. She made use of large photographic plates, dark backgrounds, and subdued lighting and she required her models to sit for a long time.

The women in Cameron’s photographs imbued tragic heroines whose sadness made them appear both beautiful and pure. Her work centered around females but she also took portraits of eminent males such as the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the painter George Frederic Watts, and the scientist Charles Darwin, to name a few. WORKING METHODS Cameron made albumen-silver prints from wet collodion glass plate negatives. She was innovative & unconventional in her approach to the technical applications of her medium in order to create images transcending a purely descriptive function of photography. From the late 1850s she came into contact with established practitioners, posed for portrait sittings, assembled albums for her family and friends and in the early 1860s even began printing the negatives of other photographers.

PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES 'I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house became my glass house! The home to hens and chickens soon changed to that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens.’ Cameron also worried about using dangerous chemicals including cyanide of potassium. USE OF FOCUS Focus seems to be the most discussed aspect of the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron. She was criticised by some of her contemporaries for what they considered the technical failure of her work given that the collodian negative could produce images of great clarity and detail. Cameron explained 'my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. When focusing & coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.’

MAKING A NEGATIVE Cameron used a standard sliding-box camera and a French made Jamin lens with a fixed aperture of f3.6 and a focal length of roughly 12 inches. After removing the lens cap the exposure time required was between 3 and 7 minutes. The glass plate was then taken back to the dark room still damp (thus 'wet plate' or 'wet collodion' negative) and a solution of developer was poured over it. The negative was washed and then bathed in hypo or cyanide to fix the image and remove unexposed silver salts. It was washed again and finally coated with varnish to enable multiple prints to be made from the plate without damaging it.

EXPERIMENTS IN PRINTING She was adventurous, innovative and unpredictable in the methods she employed to compose her photographs, the expressive power of a composition over riding her concerns for technical perfection. Cameron frequently scratched and drew into her negatives, scraped away emulsion to delete unwanted figures, cut prints to the shape that she desired and even made composite prints from her negatives to suggest a new meaning or reading of the photograph. Cameron demonstrated her skill in manipulating form, light and focus to create expressive and compelling images on many occasions.

In the early years of photography, people were trying to get better quality of the picture, sharp, in focus, posed, etc. Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneer in her way. Her portraits were blurry and out of focus. We owe her for making female portraits look even more feminine and for creating photographs with meanings (besides just capturing function). Her portraits were full of beauty, intelligence and spirituality. She felt that photographer’s purpose was to reveal their manifestation in the faces of outstanding individuals. She thought that individual will and the love of beauty could make the invisible visible. She left many written notes of her thoughts and referees to literacy and religious themes.

Julia Cameron was viewed as an eccentric. She both embodied and opposed conventional ideas about feminine behavior. She let women let their hair down, because to her it looked beautiful that way, but it was totally against the prevailing thoughts of those days. She was often criticized for her sloppy technique, but she was not concerned with perfection, but capturing the essence of individuals. In her portraits, figures are still posed, but with accordance to biblical, mythological or literacy works. Often she would make portraits on long exposures and let her subject move to intentionally create out of focus effect. Some contemporary photographers were not accepting her technique and were even making her work a laughingstock. Though, her family and friends were very supportive and she was one of the prominent amateur photographers of that time.

Beatrice May Prinsep

Paul & Virginia

‘I Wait’ – Rachel Gurney 1872

Hatty Campbell

The Kiss of Peace

When choosing Julia Margaret Cameron, I wanted to best capture the feeling I had when seeing her images for the first time. I was drawn to the warmth, dreamy and whimsical look of her portraits especially ‘The Kiss of Peace” and intrigued by the technique she used to convey these feelings so effectively. Method: In starting out I chosen my 5 favourite portraits and then started to think about who I would ask to model for me in my attempt to replicate Julia’s work. One of the most important aspects I wanted to duplicate was the long hair to add to the free, relaxed feeling of the images. Unlike any other photography I had seen from the same era. On securing my models I then acquired a backdrop, that I borrowed from the NMIT, to add to the authenticity of the shoot. WHY CHOOSE JMC?

I also wanted to replicate the clothing shown in the photos – use of calico and satin as well as the props used in “I Wait” – the angel wings and in ‘Paul and Virginia’s portrait – the parasol. When researching and thinking about the camera equipment and lighting I would use I decided to use a portrait lens and also only use 1 light source, as Julia had done. There were limitations with space I had available in which to set up my studio but overall I feel this was achieved. During the photo shoot I attempted to best copy the posing and expressions captured in the original portraits. Most importantly where the shadows feel on the faces, the tilt and angle of the heads, the way the light fell on the subject. My main aim to mirror the technique and the look of Julia Margaret Cameron. Once the shoot was completed I then explored and utilised the various techniques in Adobe Photoshop to best replicate the soft appearance and warmth these portraits needed to convey.

With regard to printing the five photos I made acetate negatives of each portrait in 8”x10”inch sizing, from there I applied two coats of Van Dyke Chemical mix to Cold Pressed water colour paper – Stonehenge Cream. Once the 2 coats were dry the acetate negative was laid flat on the coated paper and pressed against a wooden backing and an acrylic cover with bulldogs clips and placed under ultra violet light to expose the image for approximately 7minutes each. The acetate negative was then removed and the print soaked in water for 2 minutes, placed in fixer for 2 minutes, then rinsed in water again before hanging to dry overnight. As my initial prints did not turn out as hoped I decided to print the images on Museo Portfolio Rag Paper using a matt black ink jet printer. These were then mounted in 16x20inch matt boards. I intend to revisit the Van Dyke process in coming weeks. However this will be after our class deadline for submissions.

ACETATE NEGATIVEVAN DYKE PRINT

In Closing: Even though she was criticized for her soft photos I love how she made that her style. It didn’t seem to matter what the “experts” thought; she was creating something that was her own. I think that’s important for all of us. There is a point in listening to critics and how we can improve, but we also need to listen to our own hearts and Julia Margaret Cameron was a great example of that. In the early days of photography I think people were not so much interested in the art of photography, but the accuracy. They saw it as strictly a way to record a scene or a person. Art was still relegated to painting Cameron, however, saw photography as an art form. Her goal was not to record her friends’ and family’s likeness. She wanted to “secure [for photography] the character and uses of high art by combining real and ideal, and sacrificing nothing of truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.” In this, I think, she was truly ahead of her time.