From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (review)

Victoria Olsen ends her rich and engaging biography of Julia Margaret Cameron with a quotation from To The Lighthouse (1927):

The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one...Mrs Ramsay saying, 'Life stands still here'; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing...was struck into stability. Life stands still here, Mrs Ramsay said.

(270)

Virginia Woolf's words reflect the strength of Olsen's account of Cameron. There are no startling revelations here: the illumination lies in the details and the complexities of Cameron's life and art. Olsen's concern is to flesh out the cultural and personal influences that shaped Cameron's seminal photographic work and informed her influential role in Victorian culture. This is achieved in a carefully crafted biography that also subtly reflects on the enterprise of biographical writing itself—the intricate labour of archival work, the incongruous relationship between past and present, the limitations of critical speculation, the affinities with the photographic desire to arrest time and capture life. Engaging with both biographical and critical work, Olsen uses a wealth of historical evidence to give shape to the chaos of representations and myths that surround Cameron's life—beginning and ending with Woolf's collaboration with Roger Fry, which influentially portrayed her great aunt as a famous eccentric with a limited gift for portraiture. Indeed, a particular strength of Olsen's biography is that she thoroughly dismantles this potent myth by carefully reconstructing the intellectual process, as well as the personal transformations, that lay behind Cameron's interest in photography and her ambition to engage with some of the most influential intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists of her time.

The "From Life" of the title, which draws on Cameron's own authenticating inscription of her photographs, also encapsulates Olsen's underlying argument and approach. Cameron's life was not an easy one, and it is pivotal to understanding her photographic practice. Born in Calcutta in 1815, to an English father and a French mother in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, Cameron began life as she would live it, as a boundary figure caught between multiple worlds and roles. A colonial childhood defined by separation, loss, and constant movement inspired a profound resistance in the adult Cameron to the inevitable separations from her husband Charles Hay, her only daughter, and her five sons—the latter of whom all participated in the family business in Ceylon with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. The passionate contradictions that defined Cameron's life were forged early, during her informal education in France. A fervent Protestant faith emerged during her time in that Catholic country, as did an ardent passion for art, music, and literature that far exceeded what was required of an accomplished daughter from a landed family with fairly predictable marital ambitions. When Cameron did marry she chose a utilitarian sceptic, whose colonial administrative role, coupled with her social pedigree, ensured their prominence in Calcutta's Anglo- Indian society. But Cameron was not a typical colonial wife of the 1830s; Olsen convincingly details the connections between the Enlightenment ideology that shaped Cameron's unconventional upbringing and the humanitarian impulses that underlay her attitude to "the natives" in India and Ceylon, who would become the subjects of her stunning, yet rarely exhibited, photographs taken in the years before her death in 1879.

Olsen explores the range of influences and conventions that implicated Cameron in the inequities of colonial politics and the politically conservative assumptions of the establishment of which she was a privileged and influential member. Cameron, as many critics have observed, managed to be both politically conservative and deeply unconventional...