Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879) was a British photographer, whose subjects were the celebrities of the victorian era. She began photographing in a later age. Photography was her way of contacting writers, intellectuals, artists or scientists. Julia Cameron copyrighted, exhibited, and published her photographs and within some months, of starting, she sold prints to Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Some of her portraits are the only existing record of some historical figures. These records include personalities as John Everett Millais, Charles Darwin or Ellen Terry. One of the unusual characteristics of these portraits, for that time was the close crop around the subject's faces that are sometimes out of focus. The subjects appear with soft contours and is their look what gains the most intensity. 

Another part of her work are photographic illustrations that were often influenced from oil paintings or had as reference historical texts or Arthurian legends.

Margaret Cameron never built a commercial studio, also, she never made commissioned portraits. As she wrote:"I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography—map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form."

"My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty."

Julia Margaret Cameron