Julia Margaret Cameron I never versed in fields that do not know well, then behind each post there is always a real, personal or done out of necessity. In this case I would like to speak of a photographer of the nineteenth century.
Julia Margaret Cameron is a woman who lived between India, Britain and France. His life is prosperous and peaceful, despite the constant transfers. Enter the world of photography only 1863, when his daughter Julia and her husband gave her a camera and you need to set up a darkroom. The Cameron does give some lesson from John Herschel , the scientist who invented the name photography. It was his privilege as to portray men of great fame, not only in England, but in some cases worldwide.
JM Cameron was not a photographer technically perfect, but it certainly was very energetic, active and could get people to pose for her.
First place in those days meant being 3-4 hours under the sun (the flash was not yet in use), many sentences withdrawn from the diaries of his subjects speak of a certain terror of being scelti come soggetto della giornata! Tutto sommato riusciva a trovare sempre qualcuno che, per piacere o per forza, posava per lei.
La nostra fotografa è nota per i suoi ritratti maschili emblematici, caratteristica derivata dai soggetti e dal suo stile. Quest'ultimo è particolarmente riconoscibile: nelle sue fotografie solo la parte centrale, solitamente corrispondente in naso, occhi e labbra, è a fuoco, mentre tutto il resto è caratterizzato dallo sfocato, detto anche effetto flou .
Tra i ritratti maschili spiccano quelli taken at the same Herschel, Darwin to to Tennyson, in Taylor, William Michael Rossetti (who I know, you just have to know who is the subject of my thesis). Poets and scientists, all with a strong personality, great intelligence and genius. This highlights the Cameron: the face is in the foreground, the background is neutral and the light is often hard to highlight the features of faces.
note are the portraits of women . Beautiful women, hair loose over her shoulders, use of costumes, look down and an attempt to represent the ideal beauty. Not it is just that, though. It is important to remember that we are in Victorian Age, an era in which the woman is seen essentially as an object of desire and the different treatment by the photographer than males, reminds us of the mentality of the time. A useful example is to analyze the photograph depicting Ellen Terry (1864).
This is the sixteen year old wife of the painter GF Watts: she was a lively girl, funny, stage actress since childhood. Here is the image of a woman chained submissive and quiet. In fact, after his marriage he left the theater, but after 10 months of marriage thought it well to take back his life, so much to go back to being a theatrical diva, portrayed by many artists, with a niece activist for women's suffrage.
Even more famous are his put en scène.
Groups of women or children or even men in traditional clothes they stage an allegory or a medieval legend. Not even missing scenes and religious references to characters from the medieval Italian literature, like the characters of Dante's Beatrice or Petrarch's Laura. The subjects chosen are associated with those treated by Pre-Raphaelites, a brotherhood antiacademic of young painters who chose to divert their attention to the humility of nature and the myriad of literary references typical of the English and Italian (it must be remembered that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the son of Gabriele Rossetti, Italian exile because of membership uprisings of 1820. Gabriel was also a poet and literary critic, DG Rossetti also translated the new Life of Dante, and if I were to trace his family tree, we'll be looking at John William Polidori ... but that's another story). The similarities between the pre-Raphaelite paintings and photographs of Cameron is awesome, so much so that the photographer was included in the group of artists and poets associated with the movement. As I said earlier, Cameron was not very capable in the technique, and this is reflected in the preparation of photographic plates (glass) coated with photosensitive emulsion in a manner not very precise. Even if the exposure had been corrected, the air bubbles on the plate crumbled under development and fixing, making it impossible to print. This phase, however, was problematic and inaccurate. On the web you can find scans of his photographs and you can see the ruined parts. For technical details on objectives and cameras prefer not to give information, because it is not my field and I could be wrong. I can only add that the residential villa of JM Cameron, Dimbola , has become a museum for his photographs, complete with tea room, as a good English family! This is intended as a starting point. Thoroughly can be an adventure.
