Untitled (Girl Reading a Book)

Despite her late start as an artist, Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the most famous photographers of the Victorian period. She took up photography seriously in 1863 at age 48, taught herself the intricacies of the medium, and, unlike many women photographers, both publicly displayed and tried to sell her work. Insisting that photography was an art form, Cameron stated that she produced images in order 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 Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.” Cameron’s subjects were often women who “generally did not have the identity and authority in the cultural and intellectual world enjoyed by men,” and she transformed them into figures from British and religious lore and literature. Her pictures are gently lit with a limited depth of field and a slightly blurred focus, for which she was often harshly criticized in her own era. She slowly gained acclaim for her expressive, artistic images that established her as an important precursor to the twentieth-century’s Pictorialist photographers.