Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (review)

Julia Margaret Cameron's work has received an enormous amount of attention of late, and some of the best of it has been the most recent. An excellent biography by Victoria Olsen (2003), exhibition catalogues, and numerous historical and interpretive articles have enriched our understanding of Cameron's achievement while they have made her subjects more familiar to us. This latest, and most triumphant, contribution to Cameron scholarship will not be the last word, but from now on it is likely to prove the necessary first one to any serious study of the photographs.

One need only glance at the acknowledgments pages to get a sense of the enormity of the project. Seeing its cast of hundreds reminds one of a character bibliography for Charles Dickens or W. M. Thackeray; visually, it's like looking at a William Powell Frith painting. One looks, and looks, and looks again, and still there are more people in the crowd. And it seems entirely appropriate to read in these acknowledgments that "one of the most rewarding and lasting pleasures of [the] whole enterprise has been the opportunity to meet descendants of Julia Margaret Cameron, her family, friends, and sitters" (xiv), because to look at Cameron's photographs is, of course, to recognize the profoundly social element of her work. Her pictures are always about people, and a good many of those people are known not only to Cameron, but to us as well.

The biographical information we have gleaned, thanks to recent scholarship, has served to contextualize the work and arguably to soften the much-discussed artificiality of some of the photographs. We too are able to name faces and experience the pleasures of recognition. Mary Hillier may often play the Madonna, but by now Cameron devotees also know her as the long-time, long-suffering maid of the house; Ellen Terry appears in her portraits as "Sadness," and "Medora," but contemporary readers remember her career, her early marriage to G. F. Watts, and her uneasy presence (at the time of her photographing) among the Little Holland House set. Then there is the sense of community, or rather, of a finite social world, intensified by the fact that we know many of these faces from other Victorian photographs: Agnes Grace Weld appears in pictures by Lewis Carroll, for example, as does Alice Liddell.

The introduction states that "the 1,225 photographs in the catalogue section of this book reveal the breadth of [Cameron's] expression in a creative odyssey that began in 1864 on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, and ended with her death in 1879 in the hills of western Ceylon" (1). Breadth is the appropriate word here. What emerges out of the pages of this grand and beautifully organized collection is a fuller sense of the experimentation that resulted in these pictures, from Cameron's early days as a compiler of photograph albums, to her subsequent forays into developing copy negatives, to her later efforts to make her own photographs after receiving her first camera in 1864. The reader thus gains a sense of Cameron's photography as process, a much- needed counter to our tendency to consider our favorite images in creative and even historical isolation.

The book is at first glance rather overwhelming due simply to its size; but its format is clear, precise, and extremely helpful. It thus, somewhat surprisingly given the length of the work, makes for a perfectly good read cover to cover. The photographs, as one might expect, are paramount, but they are substantively illuminated by the accompanying information, which is interpretive, historical, technical, bibliographic, and generally comprehensive.

Preceding the catalogue of pictures itself are four essays of which the first two especially, by Colin Ford and Julian Cox, respectively, are useful introductions to Cameron's milieu and subject matter. A foreword by Deborah Gribbon, Director of the J. Paul Getty...