A Portrait in Pictures: Julia Margaret Cameron

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  JimW Registered Users Posts: 333 Major grins

  January 23, 2010 edited January 23, 2010

  Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)
  
  From Heilbrunn, “Her mesmerizing portraits and figure studies on literary and biblical themes were unprecedented in her time and remain among the most highly admired of Victorian photographs.”
  
  By December of 1863, Julia Cameron had raised six children who had all grown or were away at school, her husband was away in Ceylon on business, and she was lonely. Her only daughter, who had married and moved away, gave her a camera as a gift to keep her amused. She was 48 years old and had never taken a picture.
  
  She was well educated and somewhat eccentric, which is just the right amount of eccentric. While she used the wet collodion process, which allowed for faster exposure times than daguerreotypes, she bucked the trend and instead favored long exposures. This led her fellow photographers to criticize her work as being out of focus. Well, actually, it wasn’t focus; it was subject movement due to the long exposures. Galleries and critics often put down her work as being technically poor, which was true. But some galleries and critics liked it anyways. She persevered despite the criticism.
  
  Forty-eight years old is not too late to start photography and critics don’t know everything.
  
  Cameron’s photos were made just shortly after most of Nadar’s famous photos. It is interesting that they both rejected the current portrait practices as being too stiff and formal, and they both sought to reveal the essence of the subject. Nadar and Cameron each used their personalities to persuade their sitters to cooperate. Julia Cameron convinced her family and friends to let their hair down, literally, which wasn’t done in those days, and to sit still for five minute exposures, explaining that she wanted to capture their emotional state. Nadar called his efforts to relax people “psychological portraiture”. They were both just trying to get more truthful pictures of people.
  
  She put together these incredible picture albums, large, with her albumen prints taking up a whole page, showing her sitters posed in costumes and simulating allegorical paintings. On the accompanying page handwritten text refers to literary and historical figures.
  
  Besides giving us a glimpse into the Victorian era, Julia Cameron’s portraits have a spiritual quality that separates them from the vast majority of commercial work.
  
  http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/camr/hd_camr.htm
  
  <o:p> </o:p>
  The wet collodion process<o:p></o:p>
  From The National Gallery of Art website, Cameron used the "wet" collodion process, a cumbersome and sometimes dangerous procedure of multiple steps that required working with highly flammable chemicals in near darkness. Cameron had to move quickly and carefully when making and exposing collodion-on-glass negatives, since the sensitized plates had to remain damp for the duration of the process. Cameron poured the collodion, which had the consistency of very thin syrup, from a bottle onto a clean glass plate. She tipped the plate as she poured, striving for a smooth, even distribution, and then dipped the plate in silver nitrate, which made the collodion light-sensitive.<o:p></o:p>
  
  Next, with her model ready, Cameron inserted the large, wet glass plate into her wooden camera, which was equipped with a heavy brass lens. Though briefer than daguerreotype exposure times, she exposed her plates to light for three to eight minutes—too long for even the most patient model to hold completely still.
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  Then Cameron quickly moved to her darkroom, the converted coal shed in her hen house, to develop, fix, wash, dry, and varnish the plate. Cameron made a contact-print of the glass plate onto albumen paper. The paper, previously coated with salted egg white and made sensitive to light with silver nitrate, was fastened against the glass negative with a frame and set in the sun for exposure. Cameron did not use an enlarger. The resulting portraits were printed directly from the negative.<o:p></o:p>

  
  I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap.
  
  
  http://www.jimwhitakerphotography.com/
  

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