Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, which are the subject of an exhibition at the Parisian Jeu de Paume museum “Capturing Beauty”, are the perfect example of the principle according to which a photograph can be absolutely mesmerizing even if it is technically imperfect.
Not everyone will perhaps agree with this principle, but sometimes a photo that is blurry, overexposed or lacks precision and technicality can be beautiful from an artistic point of view – even if it is not from a purely technical point of view.
Not everyone has always agreed with this principle.
Julia Margaret Cameron, who was born in 1815, discovered photography at the age of 49 when her daughter offered her a camera obscura – since cameras did not yet exist.
This mother of a large family who lived, depending on the periods of her life, between Sri Lanka and England, quickly developed a passion for photography, which captivated her for a dozen years, between 1863 and 1874. Although she was an amateur, she became a renowned portrait painter.
She evolved in the London intellectual and artistic circles of her time and she enjoyed taking photographs of people around her, including personalities such like the poet Alfred Tennyson.
The technical precision of photography did not draw her attention, unlike the human essence that emerged from the people who posed for her. This explains why many of her portraits are blurry, vaporous and that they perfectly contravened the fashion of the time which wanted the photographic exercise to be of cold, documentary precision. Photographers booed her, artists adored her.
Her portraits, which evoke English Pre-Raphaelite painting, are imbued with poetry, aesthetics and humanity.
She transformed her henhouse with a glass roof into a studio (electricity did not yet exist and light was needed) and her coal cellar into a darkroom. She decided everything: the clothes, the accessories, the pose and she imposed on her subjects very long posing sessions during which immobility was required in front of a photographic camera which was a little more than a meter from the person photographed.
The framing was tight, the sessions were exhausting but Julia Margaret Cameron knew what result she wanted to obtain.
Nature or still lifes hardly interest her, only people found favor in her eyes, which explains why her photographic collection only consists of portraits.
Everyone was photographed: the celebrities, the common people, the bourgeois, the servants – she made no distinction between social distinctions of the time through her photographic work.
There is no self-portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron and that is a shame. I would have liked to see the evolution over the years of the face of this woman who obviously sought to capture the beauty that surrounded her.
December 24, 2023
