Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron was an English photographer of the nineteenth century, considered one of the most important portrait photographers of that century. She was born at Garden Reach on 11 June 1815 and died at Kalutara on 26 January 1879.

Cameron is known for her portraits of famous Victorians. She also made illustrative pictures of characters from mythology, Christianity and literature. Besides her work as a photographer, she was a writer.

Her work is associated with pictorialism, an international style that led photography in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term has no fixed definition. In broad terms, pictorialist photographers worked on what would otherwise have been a plain photograph, so as to make a picture rather than simply record a scene. For pictorialists, a photograph, like a painting, a drawing or an engraving, was a way to carry feeling to the viewer’s imagination.

Cameron’s photographs are held by many museums and libraries, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library of Wales and the Städel Museum.

The photograph shown here, Julia Jackson, is an albumen print made in England in 1867. It is a portrait of a woman, Julia Jackson, whose name is its title. The image measures 27.7 by 22 centimeters. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired it through the Harriott A. Fox Endowment, and it is part of the museum’s Photography and Media department.