Late Bloomer: Julia Margaret Cameron

  

"When we are angry or depressed in our creativity,

we have misplaced our power.

We have allowed someone else to determine our worth,

and then we are angry at being undervalued."

~Julia Margaret Cameron

Photos on this page are attributed to
Julia Margaret Cameron.

This month I've been researching creative women in the arts.
I recently discovered the moody portraits of photographer,
Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879.

What I find so inspiring about Mrs. Cameron is that, after completing her first career of raising six children, she then began her eleven-year photography career in her 48th year! She was self-taught and developed her own style of portraiture. Her images are soft focused and dream like. While she is considered an amateur photographer, having never made a living at it, she photographed the celebrities of her day like poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, painter George Frederick Watts, astronomer Sir John Herschel, and scientist Charles Darwin, to name a few. While her artistic approach was considered incorrect at the time, it seems to have influenced a great many photographers today. 

I also resonated with Cameron as a trouble maker; she pushed the boundaries of religious creeds by portraying Christ in a more natural, realistic way than was popularly accepted. She also portrayed women in an unusual light – solemn, resolute, resigned – revealing an unapologetic look into their inner thoughts and feelings. This effect most probably grew out of the fact that models had to hold the pose for so long that smiling would have been impossible. Nevertheless, Cameron produced some of the most emotional and thought provoking images of the Victorian age

that still have their place in history today.

To read more about her, check out this link.

Cameron often portrayed children as cherubs.

 Fun fact: Julia Margaret Cameron's great-niece is....writer, Virginia Woolf.