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Nineteenth century portrait photographs, including what have been termed 'the world's first close-ups'.

Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford.

Following on from it's run at the National Portrait Gallery, Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius moved to another very fitting venue - Bradford's national museum of photography.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) is arguably one of the single most important figures in the history of photography. Given a camera in 1863 - at the relatively late age of 48 - by her daughter and son-in-law, she embraced photography with a passion bordering on obsession.

The result of her passion for photography was that, in little more than a decade, she had produced hundreds of portraits - of the some of most eminent figures of the Victorian age - and equally enigmatic portraits of her servants and friends. Her remarkable photographs are recognised today as being decades ahead of their time.

Evidence of her legacy is shown in the way that Julia Margaret Cameron's portraits - of some of the great figures of Victorian art, literature, and science - have become world recognized as the definitive representations of them today.

Passion

This is the first major exhibition to draw on the finest of Cameron's prints, which have been brought together from museums and private collections throughout Europe and the United States. The exhibition brings together 120 of her most important images in a unique exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery, in collaboration with the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford.

Victoriana

Living on the Isle of Wight (where Queen Victoria had a summer home, Osborne House), Cameron converted her greenhouse and coal shed into a studio and darkroom, where she photographed Alfred, Lord Tennyson and G.F. Watts - who lived locally - as well as such distinguished visitors as Robert Browning, Charles Darwin and Sir Henry Taylor. In addition to her famous sitters, friends, family, servants - and even passers-by - were conscripted as models for her portraits and for many a fancy-dress tableaux!

Highlights

Highlights of the exhibition include portraits of those mentioned above, as well as others - including Thomas Carlyle (one of the National Portrait Gallery's first Trustees), Sir John Herschel (the scientist who coined the very word 'photography') and Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt.

Also on show are Cameron's stunning portraits of some of the Victorian period’s most renowned beauties - Julia Jackson (mother of Virginia Woolf), Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll's ‘muse’), Marie Spartali and the 16-year-old Ellen Terry (later to be regarded as among the greatest actresses of her generation).

There are elaborate costume-pieces of 'Madonnas, May Queens and Virgins', as well as children with 'solemn eyes and waving locks'. Among the contextual material are personal albums presented by the photographer to her friends and family that offer even better insight into the world of this extraordinary Victorian woman.

Pre-Raphaelite

Visitors will note that Cameron's images were strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters - Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Watts - and nowhere more so than in her costume pieces. In these she chose to illustrate religious, literary, poetic and mythological themes. Fine examples of this are her Arthurian photographs, taken to illustrate Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1874).

Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs are notable for the intimacy and psychological intensity. They have been called "the world's first close-ups" – mainly as she seems to strive for a suppression of detail and soft focus, enhanced by dramatic lighting. The distinctive look of her images is achieved by the almost exclusive use of extreme close-up.

Deliberately Un-sharp

Both the art and the science of photography were in their infancy when she began her career and her success helped increase its status as a legitimate art form. As a woman amateur, Cameron found it hard to find professional recognition in the many photographic and artistic societies that existed at the time.

Although she was elected a member of the Photographic Society in London within a year of receiving her first camera, their journal - along with the rest of the photographic press - was quick to criticise her deliberately un-sharp pictures. One fairly typical quote remarked: “As one of the special charms of photography consists in the completeness, detail and finish, we can scarcely commend works in which the aim appears to have been to avoid these qualities”. But - more importantly to Cameron - the art world consistently supported her work more than that of any of her contemporaries.

Born Julia Margaret Pattle, in Calcutta in 1815, Cameron was educated in Europe before returning to India where, in 1838, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a prominent figure in the British administration. Upon Charles' retirement in 1848 they moved to Kensington in London, where Julia moved in artistic circles, before establishing their home on the Isle of Wight. In 1875, at the peak of her fame as a photographer, the Camerons went to live in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), where Charles owned a number of coffee plantations.

She took relatively few photographs there in the four years before she died - virtually all of which are shown together, in this exhibition for the first time ever. Her work was largely forgotten, until first P. H. Emerson, then Alfred Stieglitz and Roger Fry, re-discovered it in the early 20th century.

The exhibition curator is Colin Ford, who was the 'Keeper of Photography' at the National Portrait Gallery, London, before becoming the first Head of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford. Recently retired as Director of the National Museums & Galleries of Wales, he is now a freelance curator, writer and lecturer.

The exhibition has now travelled to The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius has now ended at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, however many of the portraits from the exhibition form part of the Museum's online exhibitions programme. Follow this link to enjoy these fabulous portraits from your desktop.

Guide to images:

1. (Top image) Thomas Carlyle. Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867 © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

2. (Image in text) Call, I Follow, I Follow. Julia Margaret Cameron © V&A Picture Library Victoria and Albert Museum.

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