Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Marianne North', albumen print, 1877

Photograph of the head and shoulders of a woman (Marianne North) wearing a lace head dress, resting her head in her left hand and looking to the left. In front of her is an open book.

Given by Mrs Margaret Southam, 1941

Julia Margaret Cameron's career as a photographer began in 1863 when her daughter gave her a camera. Cameron began photographing everyone in sight. Because of the newness of photography as a practice, she was free to make her own rules and not be bound to convention. The kinds of images being made at the time did not interest Cameron. She was interested in capturing another kind of photographic truth. Not one dependent on accuracy of sharp detail, but one that depicted the emotional state of her sitter.

Cameron liked the soft focus portraits and the streak marks on her negatives, choosing to work with these irregularities, making them part of her pictures. Although at the time Cameron was seen as an unconventional and experimental photographer, her images have a solid place in the history of photography.

Most of Cameron's photographs are portraits. She used members of her family as sitters and made photographs than concentrated on their faces. She was interested in conveying their natural beauty, often asking female sitters to let down their hair so as to show them in a way that they were not accustomed to presenting themselves. In addition to making stunning and evocative portraits both of male and female subjects, Cameron also staged tableaux and posed her sitters in situations that simulated allegorical paintings.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic production slowed considerably after she moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with her husband in 1875. The botanical painter Marianne North was the only European to sit for Cameron in Ceylon. In her memoir, North described the discomfort of posing for the camera under the tropical sun.

PH.256-1982