First published 2018
Julia Margaret Cameron began photographing in her late forties and created a body of work distinguished by its soft focus technique. Her contemporaries dismissed her artistic vision, but decades later Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry recognized her significance in their 1926 study Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. This volume reprints that influential text, combining Woolf's lively biographical portrait of her great-aunt with Fry's scholarly analysis of Cameron's photographs as art rather than mere mechanical reproduction. Cameron's own voice appears through her autobiographical essay "The Annals of My Glass House" and her sole surviving poem "On a Portrait." The book includes twenty original photographic plates plus additional images that illuminate Cameron's distinctive style and the Victorian period she documented. Tristram Powell's introduction contextualizes Cameron's contributions to early photography for contemporary readers.
Genres: biography, art, 20th-century, photography, 19th-century, art-history
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: artistic-vision, historical-figures
Period: Victorian Era
192 pages · Paperback · J. Paul Getty Museum