Julia Jackson, the mother of Virginia Wolf, fearlessly returns the camera's gaze - A detail of a large poster at the entrance to the Julia Margaret Cameron

exhibition at the V&A in 2015. Text and photos © Graham Harrison.

Julia MargaretCameron andBritain’sPhotographicHeritage

Graham Harrison looks at thelife and work of Julia MargaretCameron and the history of anunsettled and priceless collection

of work which includes some ofher finest photographs, thatseems set to make acontroversial move from theNational Media Museum atBradford to the V&A in London.

“It would have been well had the fair artist paidsome attention to the mechanical portion of ourart-science. A piece of the collodion torn off theshoulders of Agnes… a broad fringe of stainthree inches in length over the arm of JamesSpedding; brilliant comets flashing across AlfredTennyson; tears chasing each other down thecheeks, but the brows, the arms, the noses, andthe backgrounds of many of her best-arrangedsubjects.” The British Journal of Photography,19 May 1865.

“One, I think. Ask Colin Ford,” said Marta Weiss, curator

of photographs at the V&A, when asked how many of JuliaMargaret Cameron’s negatives survive to this day. “Two,that I know of,” responded Ford, the former Head of theNational Media Museum at Bradford and a world expert onCameron. [1]

In the autumn and winter of 2015-16 an exhibition at theVictoria and Albert Museum and another across the road atthe Media Space at the Science Museum, celebrated thebicentenary of the birth of the Victorian portrait photographerJulia Margaret Cameron.

The V&A also hosted a study day on Cameron in January2016 and a symposium on her influences was convened atOxford University the following week. As fresh light wasshed on Cameron’s life and work and on the contexts inwhich her revolutionary approach to photography developed,a controversial decision about the move of a vital and verylarge part of Britain’s photographic heritage, including someof Cameron’s finest prints, was about to be announced.

Colin Ford: “A pivotal figure in embracing photography in Britain” at

‘Julia Margaret Cameron: Victorian networks, empire and the history of

photography today’, a one-day symposium convened at Oxford in January

2016. Photo © Graham Harrison.

THE HERSCHEL ALBUM

Dynamite, antiseptic, Tolstoy, Marx, Dickens and Alice inWonderland. Add the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameronand you have an idea of what was happening in the 1860s.

Just eleven months after taking up the far-from-straightforward wet collodion process in December 1863,Julia Cameron presented her friend Sir John Herschel with analbum of her prints. Three years later she added to the albumsome of the most remarkable portraits of the Victorian age. [2]

It was thanks to the efforts of Colin Ford that the HerschelAlbum was saved for the nation in the winter of 1974. Thealbum had been sold at auction to an American buyer for£52,000, a world record price for a photographic work.When an export licence was refused for a limited period toallow for the funds to the raised in the UK, Ford organised asuccessful campaign which received 4,000 donations,principally from the general public. The National ArtCollections Fund (Art Fund) and Kodak each contributed£5,000. [3] [4] [5]

The refusal of the export licence meant the album became thefirst photographic work anywhere in the world to be legallyrecognised as part of a nation’s heritage, a landmark decisionin the classification of photography as art.

Colin Ford, described as “A pivotal figure in embracingphotography in Britain” by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator ofPhotographs at the V&A, was then Keeper of Film andPhotography at the National Portrait Gallery under RoyStrong. For nine years Ford had argued with others for anational museum of photography.

In 1983 his efforts were rewarded when he was appointedHead of the new National Museum of Photography, Film andTelevision at Bradford. Amongst the museum’s primaryacquisitions was the wonderful Herschel Album donated bythe trustees of the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1988 the NMPFT was named museum of the year. In1989 the idea that the museum could also be a researchinstitute was realised when the Hungarian-born founder ofFocal Press, Adnor Kraszna-Krausz left his extensivepersonal archive and library to the museum.

Francis Hodgson, formerly of the FT and now a professor inthe culture of photography, has written that under Colin Fordthe Bradford museum “really was the national museum ofphotography.” After Ford left in 1992 it became “diluted”,said Hodgson. [6]

The tenure of Amanda Nevill, NMPFT Director from 1994 to2003, was considered a success as visitor numbers reachedthe one million mark and the museum collected a number ofawards, but the emphasis of the museum was edging awayfrom still photography.

When the NMPFT was renamed National Media Museum inDecember 2006, the museum’s immediate identification with

photography was lost. The Guardian asked recently, “Whatdoes ‘media’ mean when a museum’s concerned?” whiletheDaily Telegraph reported, “People didn’t know quite whatto expect from a ‘media’ museum, and were confused by thesplit-personality nature of the exhibits when they got there”.

In February 2016 the museum’s director, Jo Quinton-Tulloch, who in April 2013 had told the Guardian she wanted“to inspire the next generation of photographers and filmmakers” was on a new mission, to “concentrate on inspiringfuture generations of scientists and engineers”.

Science, technology, engineering and maths were abbreviatedto STEM, and the museum’s new focus, was to be “heraldedby a new £1.5 million interactive light and sound gallery dueto open in March 2017”, readers of the NMM web site weretold.

The mission-change was determined by continuing cuts ingovernment funding which had seen the museum narrowlyavoid closure just months after Quinton-Tulloch made hercommitment to photographers and film makers.

What attracted the headlines was the announcement thataround 400,000 objects including the Royal PhotographicSociety Collection, would be transferred from the ScienceMuseum’s National Photography Collection to the V&A inLondon.

The move reinforced the STEM agenda at the NMM, themuseum said, and “represents a reunion for some of theimages, which were once part of a single collection at the19th century South Kensington Museum before its split intothe Science Museum and the V&A.”

Responding to what appeared to be a fait accompli, eighty-three prominent figures in the arts, including ColinFord,wrote to the Times and Guardian calling for thedecision to be reversed. An online petition Stop the culturalasset stripping of Bradford’s National MediaMuseum attracted nearly 28,000 signatures.

On BBC Radio Four on 10 March, Ford said he was appalledthat there would no longer be a national museum ofphotography in Britain. “They want to separate the art ofphotography from the science and technology ofphotography and that seems to me a huge error,” said Ford,who’s success at Bradford lay in bringing the two together.[7]

The idea to move the collection had been bubbling awaybehind the scenes for a year or more during which time justtwo London museums, the V&A and the Tate,the Guardianrevealed, were asked to submit bids. Towardsthe end of this period the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibitionsopened in London and two Cameron-inspired events wereheld. Colin Ford was among the speakers at both of theevents.

At Julia Margaret Cameron at 200, a one-day conferencepresenting new research on Cameron hosted by the V&A on15 January, Ford talked in detail about the Herschel Album toMartin Barnes, the museum’s Senior Curator of Photographs.

At Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Networks, Empire and

the History of Photography Today in Oxford the followingweek, Ford explained how the response to Cameron’s workhad fluctuated over time. The two London exhibitions placedemphasis on her theatrical pictures, said Ford, which had notbeen given so much attention since the 1870s.

As early as 1836, when the the young artist-to-be JuliaMargaret Cameron met the great astronomer, scientist andphotographic pioneer, Sir John Herschel at the Cape of GoodHope, the art and science of photography appeared destinedto be a marriage made in heaven. In 1842 Herschelintroduced Cameron to the new medium of photography byletter and became her advisor and critic on photographicmatters when she took up the medium over twenty yearslater.

Her thank you to Herschel for his enduring friendship was theHerschel Album.

The cracks didn’t really matter: V&A curator of photographs Marta Weiss

explains how Cameron shunned photographic convention to creative effect

at Julia Margaret Cameron at 200 at the V&A in January 2106. Photo ©

Graham Harrison.

REFERENCE

An understanding of Cameron the photographer can begained from her unfinished autobiography, Annals of MyGlasshouse. For a sense of Cameron’s eccentricity andforceful personality look to the writings and reminiscences ofher friend, Anne Thackeray, daughter of the novelist WilliamMakepiece Thackeray, and to the diaries of the Irish poetWilliam Allingham.

In Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and FairWomen(1926), Cameron’s great-niece Virginia Wolf is drawnto the array of characters who peopled Cameron’s life whilethe artist Roger Fry examines her importance as a portraitist.Wolf also wrote a “pretty terrible” play called Freshwater,which is about Cameron, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson andthe artist George Frederic Watts.

For many years, however, the standard text on Mrs Cameronwas Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and PhotographicWork by the photographic historian Helmut Gernsheim, firstpublished in 1948. If you mention Gernsheim to a curator oracademic today you’ll elicit an intake of breath and a slightlypained expression. Look to his wife Alison, they say, she wasthe real historian, read her research not his self-promotion.

However, it was Helmut Gernsheim who pushed for anational museum of photography in Britain in the early 1950s,and with their prodigious writing, collecting and research, itwas the Gernsheims who “drew the map” of photographichistory, Colin Ford said at the V&A conference in January.

Jump forward nearly seventy years from the publication ofthe Gernsheim book and the events marking Cameron’sbicentenary in London and Oxford in 2015-16 revealed amore nuanced understanding of the religious, colonial andartistic contexts of her work. There was also a reminder ofthe extraordinary energy this mother of six employed ineverything she undertook, not just in her photography but inbefriending and maintaining friendships with just abouteveryone of note in mid-Victorian England.

Julia concentrated her attention especially on poets, artistsand writers, although not exclusively, writing three hundredletters a month and dispatching six or more telegrams eachday. She would shower her friends and acquaintances withgifts and send them albums to promote herself andshamelessly ask them to mention her name in The Times, thenewspaper of record. This was not without reason.

“She knows a beautiful head when she sees it – a very rarefaculty,” wrote a sympathetic critic in Macmillan Magazine in1866. “And her position in literary and aristocratic societygives her the pick of the most beautiful and intellectual headsin the world.”

PATTLEDOM

Julia Margaret Pattle was born at Garden Reach, Calcutta on11 June 1815, the second of eight surviving daughters ofJames Pattle, an official in the East India Company, andAdeline de l’Etang, a descendent of the French aristocracywith a hint of Bengali blood.

The Pattle sisters were famous for their high-handedness andgood looks and for their marriages to distinguished oldermen. Thackeray, who met them during their education inParis, fell in love with each of them a little and is creditedwith christening their close-knit, Bengali-speaking circle,‘Pattledom’. [8]

It is possible that Sir John Herschel introduced Julia to herfuture husband, the scholar and reformist lawyer Charles HayCameron at the Cape of Good Hope in 1836. Both Julia andCharles were convalescing after illness.

Two years later the couple married in Calcutta Cathedral.Charles was twenty years her senior and had fathered twoillegitimate children in England but he indulged Julia’s whimsand eccentricities and she adored him. She bore her husbandfive sons and a daughter and fifteen months after she died, inCeylon on 26 January 1879, he too passed away and wasburied beside her in a church cemetery near his ailing coffeeestates. They had been married for forty years. [9]

TO ENGLAND

A descendent of the Earls of Erroll, Charles Cameron hadworked in Ceylon as a lawyer to the Commission of Enquiryinto the Eastern Colonies and would later purchase coffee

estates in the Dimbula and Dikoya valleys on the island. Hebecame a member of the ruling Council of India, a bodysubordinate only to the Crown and the Directors of the EastIndia Company.

According to Cecil Beaton in The Magic Image (1975), theabsence of the governor-general’s wife meant Julia “queenedit” as the first lady of Anglo-Indian society. [10]

Beaton also stated that Julia developed a mutual dislike of hersuburban neighbours when the couple moved to England onCharles’ retirement in 1848. [11]

More to Cameron’s liking were the gatherings of artists andwriters at Little Holland House, the secluded Kensingtonhome of her sister Sara and husband Henry Thoby Prinsep, aformer East India Company director. It was here that Juliamet many of her future subjects and mixed with those sheknew already, including Charles’ friend Sir Henry Taylor whohad introduced the Cameron’s to the Poet Laureate, AlfredLord Tennyson.

They also met the Prinsep’s long-term house-guest, thepainter George Frederic Watts who became Mrs Cameron’sartistic mentor.

At the conference Julia Margaret Cameron at 200, at theV&A in January, Watts’ biographer Barbara Bryant revealedthe extent to which the painter’s creativeexplorationspermeated life at Little Holland House, where itwas said to be “always Sunday afternoon”. [12]

Photographic sessions would take place in the large maturegarden where poses and drapery were arranged and thenphotographed to produce reference images for Watts to usewhen he worked on studio paintings and frescoes.

Among the photographers taking part were Cameron’sbrother-in-law, Charles Viscount Eastnor, Earl Somers, afounding vice-president of the Photographic Society ofLondon (renamed the Royal Photographic Society of GreatBritain in 1894), and the Swedish-born painter-turned-photographer Oscar Rejlander. [13]

Rejlander photographed Cameron’s niece and future favouritesubject, Julia Jackson, in the garden and, Bryant believes,took a previously unattributed photograph of Cameronherself.

In the half-length portrait dated “about 1856”, Cameron looksneither weary nor bored as she often does in other people’swork. She holds a watchcase in her hand and leans against agreat tree with such a melancholy expression on her face thatyou wonder if she’s timing Rejlander’s exposure, althoughit’s more likely she is looking at a miniature painted by Wattsof her sister Virginia, Earl Somers’ wife. [14]

It is the kind of photograph that Cameron would have pastedinto one of the eight photographic albums she is known tohave compiled before she owned a camera herself.

One such volume is the Signor Album of 1857, most likely agift for Watts (Signor being the name given him because ofhis time spent in Italy where he first met the Prinseps) which

contains thirty-five images taken by different photographersand anticipates the blend of photographs of famous men andfamily groups that Cameron would assemble in albums of herown work. [15]

The gatherings at Little Holland House in the 1850s and 1860shave been considered a forerunner of the Bloomsbury circle.Bourgeois convention was something of an anathema to thePattle sisters. Indeed, Julia Jackson, Cameron’s niece whoposed for Rejlander at Little Holland House and later for someof Cameron’s most celebrated female portraits, would bemother to Virginia Wolf and Vanessa Bell, the BloomsburyGroup bohemians. [16]

In 1860, while on a visit to the Tennyson’s on the Isle ofWight, Julia bought two cottages at Freshwater Bay. Shejoined the cottages together with a castellated turret, namedthe property ‘Dimbola’ after one of Charles’ coffee estates,and set about creating an artistic community of her own.

DIMBOLA

The purchase was made when Charles and their eldest sonwere in Ceylon visiting the coffee estates. In December 1863they were absent again. To “fill her solitude” Cameron’sdaughter and son-in-law gave her a camera, lens, glass platesand the chemicals for the wet collodion process.

In Annals of My Glass House, Julia refers to the “tenderardour” with which she handled her French-made 12 inch(300mm) f3.6 Jamin fixed-aperture lens, the only piece of herequipment to have survived to this day, and seeminglydestined for the V&A. The Jamin became “as a living thing,with voice and memory and creative vigour,” she recalled.Instinctively, Julia Cameron knew the lens to be the soul ofpicture taking. [17]

The coal house at Freshwater might already have beenconverted into a darkroom as she referred to producing printsherself in an album she gave to her sister Virginia. Morefamously the chickens were exiled from the glazed fowlhouse at Freshwater to be replaced by what she described as“poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens”.

There is a recently discovered photograph titled Idyls of theVillage probably taken by Oscar Rejlander. The image showstwo maids at the well at Dimbola with Cameron’s studio tobe, the glazed fowl house, behind them. It was found byMarta Weiss, curator of photographs at the V&A with thehelp of research assistant Erika Lederman during theirresearch on Cameron and was exhibited for the first time atthe V&A exhibition.

Weiss believes the photograph, possibly taken in the summerof 1863, provides a glimpse of Julia’s activity before sheacquired her first camera that December and may beevidence of further collaboration with Rejlander, who shewould, by then, have known for seven or eight years.

Marta Weiss, curator of photographs at the V&A photographed with the

#VictorianMe frame at the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition at the V&A

in 2015. Photo © Graham Harrison.

FINALLY, PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE ART

Julia Margaret Cameron photographed only people. Her workcan be divided into portraits of famous men and youngwomen, pictures of madonnas (invariably her long-sufferinghousemaid Mary Hillier), and what she called her “fancypictures” – romantically inspired photographs, either ofchildren or tightly-packed groups in the glazed fowl house,perhaps, that included at least one young woman with longflowing hair.

Cameron’s “first success”, as she called it, was a portrait ofthe child, Annie Wilhelmina Philpot, the “sweet sunny hairedlittle Annie”, taken in January 1864.

The focus on Annie’s face is slightly beyond the plane of thechild’s eyes but sharp focus was not something to worryCameron unduly during her first two or three years as aphotographer. Her mentor Herschel never criticised herfocussing, and she proclaimed early on that she focused onbeauty and not for the definition which she said “all otherphotographers insist upon”. However, as her techniqueimproved so did her focus, notably after the purchase of asecond, larger camera and lens in 1865. [18]

Six months after taking up photography, Julia had workaccepted for the Photographic Society of London’s tenthexhibition and sent twelve portraits, including a“Raphaelesque Madonna” and a profile of Henry Taylor, to

the Edinburgh Photographic Society. [19]

Within a year she could present Herschel with his album.After the 1867 revision, the album included Cameron’sportraits of Tennyson, Carlyle, Watts and Herschel and herbeautiful niece Julia Jackson who had married for the firsttime and was then Mrs Herbert Duckworth.

Perhaps the finest portrait in the Herschel Album is Iago, aremarkable close-up head of a professional male model,thought to be the Italian Alessandro di Marco. His eyes aredowncast and he is deep in thought. At the Oxford seminarColin Ford declared Cameron’s Iago, “One of the finestportraits of the nineteenth century. In any medium”.

Sitting in Gallery 100 at the V&A in November 2015, MartaWeiss explained how the photographic establishment in the1860s reacted to Cameron’s extraordinary efforts. Theythought she had misunderstood photography, said Weiss.AsProfessor Mike Weaver wrote in 1984, “They would havepreferred her to have a sharper focus and narrowerambitions, but she gave them soft focus and large ambitions”.

Marta Weiss said the early photo-establishment in Londonwere galled by the praise Cameron received from the broaderartistic community and from critics in popular periodicals likethe Athenaem and the Illustrated London News whichannounced that, finally, photography can be art.

BOOKS

The Gernsheim monograph Julia Margaret Cameron: HerLife and Photographic Work published in 1948, was the firstdetective work on Cameron’s life and photography. TheMunich-educated Gernsheim, author of New PhotoVision(1942), believed the portraits were where herimportance lay, an opinion advanced as early as 1889 byGeorge Bernard Shaw when art critic on The Star.

Shaw wrote, “While the portraits of Herschel, Tennyson andCarlyle beat hollow anything I have ever seen . . . there arephotographs of children . . . inartistically grouped andartlessly labelled as angels, saints or fairies”.

In Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and FairWomenRoger Fry also concentrated on Cameron’s portraits.“Mrs Cameron had a wonderful perception of character as itis expressed in form, and of form as it is revealed or hiddenby the incidence of light,” wrote Fry.

“Take, for example, the Carlyle. Neither Whistler nor Wattscome near to this in the breadth of the conception, in thelogic of the plastic evocations, and neither approach thepoignancy of this revelation of character,” Fry wrote.Gernsheim agreed: “The photographer scores in every caseagainst the painter,” he wrote in the 1971 edition of AConcise History of Photography.

“Working for her own satisfaction and not for a living,”wrote Gernsheim, “Mrs Cameron could afford to go her ownway, and become a pioneer of a new kind of portraiture – theclose-up. She had the real artist’s gift of piercing through theoutward appearance to the soul of the individual.”

For many years praise of her portraits was at the expense ofher allegories and “fancy pictures”. In his History ofPhotography written in 1964, Beaumont Newhall wrote,“Without the challenge of interpreting great personalities, herwork tended to become lost in sentiment and to echopainting.” In his Concise History, first published in 1965,Gernsheim goes further, “In this rational age it is obvious tous that one cannot photograph ‘The Wise and FoolishVirgins’, a Sibyl, St Cecilia, or the Annunciation, because therealism of the medium inevitably reduces the sublime to theridiculous”. But times change.

By 1978 a more inclusive view of Cameron’s enterpriseappears. Writing, perhaps, for an anthology, the editor,academic and advocate of photography Bill Jay noted, “Somecritics have seen fit to differentiate between her portraits(which they praise) and her theatrical setups (which theydeplore). This is to totally miss the point. Both are an integralpart of a complete whole, expressing an individual’s sense ofself and the age in which she lived with a singular vision.They are not ‘different’, but indivisible expressions of aharmonious whole; each is less complete when seenalone.”[20]

Jay went on, “As Colin Ford has pointed out, the 19thcentury person believed in heroes and they produced heroesto match their belief. Mrs. Cameron’s fiercest ambition wasto pay homage to these heroes, and she could do so becauseshe herself had the heroic spirit.”

But Bill Jay’s anthology was never published and it wasn’tuntil 1984 that a more holistic view of Cameron’s work waspresented to the public by Mike Weaver with his “key workof Cameron scholarship” Julia Margaret Cameron 1815-1879. [21]

Weaver’s book accompanied an Arts Council-backed touringexhibition which was shown at Colin Ford’s newly openedNational Museum of Photography, Film and Television inBradford in 1984 and at the V&A in London in 1985.

In his book, Weaver looked in detail at what Bill Jay and ColinFord had realised, that the penetrating portraitist with theheroic spirit was also a High Victorian god-fearing womanwho’s inspiration lay in the influences of her time, especiallyRomantic, Scared and Pre-Raphaelite art.

Detail of Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of William Michael Rossetti

taken in the garden at Little Holland House in 1865. The umbrella held on

the right of the frame is reducing the amount of light hitting the sitter’s

beret and the left side of his face. Photo © Graham Harrison.

UMBRELLAS

In Marta Weiss’s book Julia Margaret Cameron:Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle theworld written to accompany the V&A exhibition, is a portraitof William Michael Rossetti, brother of the painter DanteGabriel Rossetti, taken on the lawn at Little Holland House in1865. Behind Rossetti is the same mature tree against whichJulia leaned with a watchcase in her hand for Rejlander adecade earlier.

The turn of the head, and the slight twist of Rossetti’s bodyto accommodate his left hand clasping his right arm,counterbalances the diagonal of the great tree trunk as doesthe angle of the beret on his head. Above Rossetti’s leftshoulder is a disembodied hand holding a black umbrella thatshades the light from the beret which almost disappears intoshadow.

The umbrella might be in the hand of Robert Browning, thenabout to reach the peak of his powers as a poet whoCameron also photographed in front of the tree. But what isinteresting here is why, at a time when exposures werepainfully long – and Cameron’s typically ran between three toseven minutes – she deliberately reduced the amount of lightreaching her subject to achieve the effect she wanted. [22]

Her umbrella shades all but a kiss of daylight whichilluminates Rossetti’s left temple, cheekbone and the left side

of his ample beard. Light from the opposite side hitsRossetti’s right cheek below the eye to create a diagonal oflight.

The photographic imperative of a shorter exposure and asmaller aperture which would have given Cameron a betterchance of a static subject and greater depth of field weresacrificed for the painterly effects of modelling andchiaroscuro.

And sometimes it wasn’t only the light hitting the subject thatCameron controlled with her umbrella. In Photographs toelectrify you with delight Marta Weiss quotes a critic writingin The Photographic News who described how Cameronsometimes “waved an umbrella in front of the lens duringexposure, shading off the lights from various parts, andnecessarily still more protracting the exposure”. [23]

Julia Margaret Cameron refused the head rests and otherdevices that would help her sitters remain still, said HarvardProfessor Robin Kelsey at the V&A conference in January.

She kept her lens uncovered as their eyes welled up and othersigns of uncontrollable vitality accumulated on the gelatinoussurface of the wet glass plate.

By doing so, Cameron ensured that the dynanism of hersubjects entered her photographs, Robin Kelsey said, as didher own extraordinary energy from the other side of thecamera and lens. And she embraced whatever accidentshappened along the way, be they blurs, scratches or unevenprocessing. Such faults became an affirmation for her, “asign of human life”.

Detail of a half-length portrait of an unknown man, probably a member of

the Little Holland House circle, 1864-66. The uneven application of

chemicals is typical of Cameron’s early work. Photo © Graham Harrison.

IMPERFECTIONS

Julia Margaret Cameron was a “total rule breaker” said MartaWeiss surrounded by the results of Cameron’s extraordinaryefforts at the V&A. “She left the traces of her process on herphotographs. They are full of these little imperfections hercontemporaries would have dismissed as flaws. She seemedto accept, possibly embrace them at times,” said the Harvardand Princeton educated curator.

“The beautiful photograph, Sappho, from 1865, for example,where she cracked the negative but made prints from it

anyway – and there are multiple prints of it – clearly, she feltthat something was successful about the image. The cracksdidn’t really matter”.

“And there are other examples,” said Weiss. “Even thoughshe very proudly said that she didn’t retouch herphotographs, she did sometimes, but she did it with suchdirectness it’s kind of funny. She scratches a moon into apicture or she tries her hand at combination printing, whichby that time Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson are doing ina very skilful way.” [24]

“When Julia Margaret Cameron does combination prints shejust sticks two separate photographs together and you see theseam very clearly right in the middle”.

“So there’s a frankness to her process which is interesting,especially seen from the perspective of today when a lot ofcontemporary artists deliberately leave traces of theirprocess,” said Weiss.

“It’s not just her attitude to the traces and the closeups, butthe lighting: the way her faces seem to emerge out ofdarkness, you get these isolated heads,” Marta Weiss said.“She has always been modern”. To prove her point, Weisschose a head-on portrait of Julia Jackson for her book coverand for a giant enlargement which greeted visitors to theshow on the second floor of the V&A.

With slight scratching and some small blotches, Cameron’sphotograph of Jackson is direct and eternal. Cameron’ssecond, larger camera, bought in 1865, was built to takemassive 20 × 15 inch plates and fitted with a 30 inch(760mm) Dallmeyer Rapid Rectilinear lens, an optic correctedfor spherical and chromatic aberration. Jackson’s eyes aresharp and the blemishes on her skin can clearly be seen. [25]

Jackson was 21 when the picture was taken and about tobecome Mrs Herbert Duckworth. And although she died overa century ago the image has such presence that she’spalpably alive and looking back at you here and now. As theexhibition caption pointed out, Jackson “fearlessly returns thecamera’s gaze”.

Then there’s the framing, Julia Jackson’s head is one-ninthof the frame and dead centre. The corners of the image helpto focus the eyes of the viewer onto the eyes of the sitter.The space around the head lets the viewer think for themself.

Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor in the History of Art atOxford, speaking from the audience at the Oxford seminar,said Rembrandt and Titian leave room for the spectator intheir portraits. “She clearly got that, maybe from Watts,” saidProfessor Kemp who has a special interest in the relationshipof art to science.

On 18 February 1866, Cameron wrote to Sir John Herschelin her usual ebullient style: “I have just been engaged in thatwhich Mr. Watts has been urging me to do. A Series of Lifesized heads – they are not only from Life, but to the Life, andstartle the eye with wonder and delight. I hope they willastonish the public.” Her enormous camera, in a time beforeenlargers were readily available, was at last giving Cameron a

print size she was happy with. “From life not enlarged”shewrote proudly on one of her prints of Herschel. [26]

It is suspected that a source of inspiration for Cameron werethe colour lithographs, or chromolithographs, of artworkspublished by the Arundel Society, the Society for Promotingthe Knowledge of Art, of which Cameron was a longstanding member. [27]

The society’s intention was to foster a greater knowledge ofart among the British public with the publication of literaryworks and reproductions of predominantly Renaissance art,especially frescoes considered under threat from neglect orconflict in post-Napoleonic Italy.

SIR AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD

The prime mover of the Arundel Society was thearchaeologist and politician, Sir Austen Henry Layard acultivated polymath who’s tracings of Italian frescoes are inthe prints and drawings collection at the V&A. He also soughtout the cities of the Bible located in Ottoman Mesopotamia.[28]

Between 1845 and 1851 Layard excavated the Assyrian sitesof Nimrud and Nineveh for the British ambassador to theOttoman empire and subsequently for the Trustees of theBritish Museum.

Layard lived among the Kurds, Arabs and Yazidis andattended a Yazidi wedding near Mozul. His discoveriesincluded the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, cuniformtablets of immense historical value and a monumental human-headed winged lion and a human-headed winged ox which,having remained undisturbed for 2,700 years, were removedand dispatched on a 600 mile journey down the Tigris toBasra and a 12,000 mile voyage with the British Navy toEngland and the British Museum where they remain to thisday.

Having completed his most adventurous travels Layardentered politics and at 52 married the 25-year-old Mary EnidEvelyn. The couple were photographed separately by JuliaCameron the year of their marriage, Mary Enid in March1869, the month of their wedding. [29]

Having wed a much older man herself, Cameron may havebeen interested in exploring the moment in a young woman’slife when the innocence of youth gave way to theresponsibilities of childbearing and motherhood and becominga dutiful Victorian wife.

In such a context her 1867 portrait of Julia Jackson, takenjust before her marriage to Herbert Duckworth, and theimage used by Marta Weiss for her book cover and at theentrance of the V&A exhibition, can be seen as some sort ofexamination.

The 1867 portrait of Julia Jackson at the entrance of the Julia Margaret

Cameron exhibition which ran at the V&A from November 2015 to

February 2016. Photo © Graham Harrison.

A RARE SENSIBILITY

Julia Jackson’s hair is undone and tousled as Cameron liked itfor her female subjects. The clothing is in shadow but it maywell have been crumpled and somewhat in disarray. RobinKelsey pointed out at the V&A conference in January, thatCameron would enforce a tousled, crumpled look on hersitters to distance herself from the neat propriety sought bythe commercial portrait photographers of the day. “She aimedbeyond the meticulousness observed as an alibi for failedimagination,” said the Harvard Professor loftily.

A scene in Anne Thackerary’s short story From anIsland(1877), deftly captures the collaborative dramasurrounding the taking of a Cameron photograph such as TheRosebud Garden of Girls of 1868, an image which takes it’sname from Tennyson’s morbid and quintessential VictorianpoemMaud (1855), in which the speaker’s decomposingcorpse gives life to blossoming flowers in the garden wherehis true love walks.

Julia Cameron’s debt to the artist George Frederic Watts ismade clear in the scene, as is her desire to make money outof the enterprise.

All the reader need do, in this instance, is substitute Cameronfor the photographer George Hexham and Watts for the artistSt. Julien, who has just proposed that a group photograph betaken.

“I was longing to try a group,” said Hexham, “and onlywaiting for leave. How will you sit?” And he began placingthem in a sort of row, two up and one down, with a property-table in the middle. He then began focussing, and presentlyemerged, pale and breathless and excited, from the littleblack hood into which he had dived. “Will you look?” saidhe to St. Julian.

“I think it might be improved upon,” said St. Julian, gettinginterested. “Look up, Missie – up, up. That is better. Andcannot you take the ribbon out of your hair?”

“Yes, uncle St. Julian, said Missie, but it will all tumbledown.”

“Never mind that,” said he; and with one hand Missie pulledaway the snood, and then the beautiful stream came flowing

and rippling and falling all about her shoulders.

“That is excellent,” said the painter. “You, too, Hester,shake out your locks.” Then he began sending one for onething and one for another… When we got back we found oneof the prettiest sights I have ever seen, – a dream of fairladies against an ivy wall, flowers and flowing locks, andsweeping garments…

“It takes one’s breath away,” said St. Julian, quite excited,“to have the picture there, breathing on the glass, and to feelevery instant that it may vanish or dissolve with a word, witha breath. I should never have nerve for photography.”

As for the picture, Hexham came out wildly exclaiming fromhis little dark room: never had he done anything so strangelybeautiful, – he could not believe it; it was magical… Hexhamrushed up to St. Julian. “It is your doing,” he said. “It iswonderful. My fortune is made.” [30]

COPYRIGHT

The industrialisation and increasing mechanisation of society,of which the camera was part, opened a world ofopportunities for the nineteenth century entrepreneur. TheCamerons were not as financially secure as Julia wantedthem to be and was determined to make money out ofphotography.

She saw her future an artist selling prints through galleriesjust as wholesalers were selling cartes des visites of famoussitters taken by more practical photographers by the tens ofthousands. Such enterprise was facilitated by the passing ofthe Fine Art Copyright Act in 1862 which extended copyrightprotection to photographs.

As early as July 1864, just seven months after taking upphotography, Julia entered a business agreementwithColnaghi, to print and sell her photographs and hired theColnaghi Gallery in 1866 and German Gallery in 1868 forcommercial exhibitions.

She was also determined in her persuit of exclusivity,asProfessor Larry Schaaf pointed out during the Oxfordseminar.

Her extraordinary image of her friend Sir John Herschel in theHerschel Album, was taken when the eminent scientist was illand at his home in Kent, said Schaaf. Having arrived with acart-load of equipment, Cameron insisted he wash his hair sothat it would stand out against her black background andurged Herschel to sign some mounts and promise her neverto be photographed by anyone else. [31]

In 1868 she wrote to Sir Henry Cole, the first Director of theSouth Kensington Museum (later the V&A), to thank him forthe loan of two rooms at the museum and for understandingthat, “A woman with sons to educate cannot live on famealone”. A year later, however, Cameron would complain toCole that after five years of “ardent patient persisting toil” shehad “not yet by one hundred pounds” recovered the moneyshe had spent on her enterprise, an extraordinary admissionfor a Victorian woman to make.

She was, observed Helmut Gernsheim, never good atbalancing the books and gave away more prints than shecould ever have sold. Even her usually indulgent husband,Charles, urged her to be less extravagant in photographicmaterials.

In 1875 she gave some of her negatives to the AutotypeCompany to make copy negatives (which, incidentally, theyretouched and removed some of the vitality) at a cost to herof two guineas each. The idea being that they would producecarbon prints to sell at seven shillings and six pence each.She then tried to revoke the agreement on discovering theycharged forty percent commission. Changing her mind againCameron proposed they produce some new prints.

Julia Cameron’s very first batch of photographs wereregistered for copyright protection at Stationer’s Hall inLondon shortly after she took up photography. In allsheregistered 508 of the 3,000 images she is thought to havetaken. Half of those she registered have never been found.

Her first ten photographs to be registered were entered in thecopyright ledger on 30 May 1864. Her last five, includingportraits of Herschel and Watts, her great mentors, andTennyson, her most eminent supporter, were entered on 20October 1875, shortly before Julia and Charles left Dimbolafor a more modest life with their sons in Ceylon.

The iron-hulled passenger liner SS Mirzapore on which the Camerons

sailed to Ceylon in 1875. The Mirzapore was built by P&O to exploit the

Red Sea route to India and the Far East created by the opening of the Suez

Canal in 1869.

A COW AND TWO COFFINS

The journey between Europe and India, which Julia andCharles Cameron would have endured many times in theirlives became quicker and safer as the steamship replaced sailand the Suez canal, opened in 1869, cut weeks off thejourney to the East.

The family recount that Charles longed to return to ‘Empire’sLast Eden’, but Robin Kelsey referencing Mike Weaversuggested that a loss of investments already sustained and thepotential loss of his coffee estates to the hemleia vastratrixleaf fungus then ravaging the monoculture on the island, wasa serious threat to the Cameron’s income and to their socialstatus, which Julia had nurtured for so long. There werewinners and losers as Britain emerged as the super-power ofthe nineteenth century. The Camerons had joined the losers.

Julia and Charles departed with great commotion and sailedfor Ceylon on the SS Mirzapore with much luggage andphotographs and a cow and two coffins.

The cow was precaution against tuberculosis. The coffinswere in case the Camerons were unfortunate enough to die atsea, a fate which had befallen Julia’s mother and her eldestsister, Adeline Maria, in years past. Julia bustled and Charles,who suffered from kidney trouble, appeared in better healththan he had been in years. [32]

Four of the Cameron’s five sons were living on the island,three administering what was left of the family coffeeplantations. Their middle son, Hardinge Hay, who’s studies atOxford had ended through lack of money, worked there as acivil servant. He accompanied his parents on what proved tobe their penultimate journey East.

Emilia Terracciano, a Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art, toldthe Oxford seminar that Charles had acquired land in Ceylonas early as 1835. The Camerons were the largest singleproprietors on the island, Terracciano said, and recruited theearliest Tamil labourers from India. Julia’s images taken onthe island were “photographs of bondage and part of our owncollective history of race,” she said.

Certainly Cameron did not record the names of her Ceylonesesubjects just as she rarely identified her British-born servantsin her photographs. In the context of nineteenth centurycolonialism, however, the Camerons should be classified asliberals within a predominantly high Tory establishment.

Charles was a follower of the philosopher Jeremy Benthamwho believed “it is the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber that is the measure of right and wrong”. He workedfor legal reform in Ceylon, and in India for the education ofthe native population, helping to establish the University ofCalcutta. Julia, in Calcutta in 1845, employed her undoubtedenergy to organise a relief fund for the Irish potato famine.She raised £14,000, perhaps worth a £1 million in today’smoney. She was never so successful in earning moneyherself.

In April 1878, Julia, Charles and Hardinge returned toEngland briefly and unexpectedly. On the voyage Julia wroteabout the saleabilty of her work and hoped the AutotypeCompany could be persuaded to market her work better.

That July and again in August, a notice was published in TheTimes advertising the sale of Dimbola, “the well-knownresidences of Charles Hay Cameron, Esq., and Mrs. JuliaMargaret Cameron”. [33]

Five months after the second advert appeared in thenewspaper Julia died in Ceylon and Charles followed hershortly after.

THE VISITING BOTANIST

What survives from Julia Cameron’s three and a half years inCeylon are less than thirty photographs, although, whilestaying with Hardinge on the coast at Kalutara, they weresurrounded by prints, recalled the artist and botanist MarianneNorth who visited the Camerons in January 1877.

“The walls of the rooms were covered with magnificentphotographs,” North noted in volume one of herautobiography Recollections of a Happy Life (1892). “Others

were tumbling about the tables, chairs and floors, withquantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque.”

The botanist wrote that for three days Julia was “in a fever ofexcitement” photographing her guest, the only European to sitfor her in Ceylon. “She dressed me up in flowing draperies ofcashmere wool, let down my hair, and made me stand withspiky cocoa-nut branches running into my head, the noondaysun’s rays dodging my eyes between the leaves as the slightbreeze moved them, and told me to look perfectly natural(with a thermometer standing at 96˚)!”, said North.

“Then she tried me with a background of breadfruit leavesand fruit, nailed flat against a window shutter, andtold themto look natural.”

“But both failed,” wrote North. However, time has proved abetter judge and the twelve plates and “enormous amount oftrouble” Cameron expended in the exercise were not wasted.Prints of two quite intense portraits of North have survivedas has a truly beautiful full length silhouette of the botanistpainting on the veranda at Kalutara, a success rate of twenty-five percent.

The well known description of tame rabbits, squirrels andmina birds running in and out of the house “without theslightest fear” and the grey whiskered monkeys and all sortsof fowls outside also come from North’s description ofKalutara. As does the depiction of the handsome stagguarding the entrance and of Charles, then 84, walking roundthe veranda, joining in conversation, quoting poetry andreading aloud to North as she painted.

Asked personally at Oxford why the Marianne North portraitshave receive so little attention, Colin Ford said he really didn’tunderstand at all. “I could kill for that veranda photograph!”he said.

Elizabeth Edwards, recipient of the 2014 Society for VisualAnthropology Lifetime Achievement Award, said at Oxfordthat Julia Margaret Cameron had lifelong ties to the imperialand colonial endeavour. “There has been a mistakenmarginalisation of Cameron’s Ceylon work,” said Edwards.

That marginalisation may be attributed to Helmut Gernsheimwho, in 1948, dismissed her Ceylon photographs as “quiteunimportant”.

COBURN’S CAMERONS

Also speaking at the Oxford seminar, which was convenedby Dr Mirjam Brusius, Research Fellow in PhotographicHistory at Oxford University, was Pamela Roberts, curator ofthe RPS collection for nineteen years until 2001 and co-author of the book Alvin Langdon Coburn (2015). Robertsexplained how the American-born photographer played a keyrole in the recognition and preservation of Cameron’s work.

With PH Emerson, Frederick Evans and his fellow AmericanClarence White, Coburn regarded Julia Margaret Cameron ashis great forebear in photography. “She gave this Anglo-American tradition of pictorial photographers its foundation,”writes Professor Mike Wheeler in The PhotographicArt(1986). “Cameron was a typological feminist, an artist of

genius, who was capable of expressing psychological insightinto the nature of relations between men and women in a pre-Symbolist manner.” Like her, the Pictorialists used thecamera as a means of self-expression. They employed soft-focus and processed and printed their images in ways todifferentiate their work from the documentary image.

Inspired by a “splendid collection of Mrs Cameron’s work”at the Serendipity Gallery in London in 1904, Coburn beganto collect her pictures, among them Kaltura Peasants (1875),Alice Liddle as Pamona (1872) and the extraordinaryMountain Nymph Sweet Liberty (1866). [34]

Pamela Roberts thought that some of Coburn’s prints mayhave come from the Cameron family, perhaps from Coburn’spublisher Gerald Duckworth who was the son of JuliaJackson from her first marriage. Coburn also managed tosecure Cameron’s Jamin lens. [35]

In 1914 he loaned his original Cameron prints for anexhibition at the Royal Photographic Society which becamepart of a bigger project on the old masters of photographyshown in New York. Coburn, who settled in Wales, gave theJamin lens and his best Cameron prints to the RPS in 1928and donated a further ninety Cameron prints to the Society in1930.

The Living Body, a Kodak sponsored exhibition held at the Royal

Photographic Society HQ at the Octagon in Bath in 1985. Kodak helped

save the Hershel Album with a last minute donation of £5,000 in 1975 and

donated £50,000 to the RPS for the Society’s move to Bath in 1980.

Today, Kodak sponsors the Kodak Gallery at the National Media Museum

in Bradford to which they have donated 35,000 objects and images.

LONDON, BATH, BRADFORD, LONDON

There are 250,000 artefacts dating from 1827 to today in theRoyal Photographic Society Collection, including 31,000books and 8,000 items of photographic equipment. All ofwhich may soon be leaving Bradford for the V&A in London.

Among the collection’s treasures are Fox Talbot’s papernegatives and prints, his early cameras, letters and notebooks,three hundred and fifty Hill and Adamson salt prints andseven hundred and eighty prints by Roger Fenton. FromCameron alone – partly thanks to the American exile AlvinLangdon Coburn – there are seven hundred and forty-eightalbumen prints, her Jamin lens and the original text forAnnalsof My Glass House.

When the Society’s Mayfair headquarters became tooexpensive to maintain in the late 1970s the RPS launched asuccessful £300,000 international appeal to createan RPSNational Photographic Centre at the Grade II listedOctagon Church in Bath, Somerset. [36]

“It is our intention to create in Bath the main centre ofphotography in the country, if not in theworld,” RPSSecretary Kenneth Warr announced grandlywhen the appeal was launched in June 1978. [37]

Kodak, which had donated £5,000 to save the HerschelAlbum for the nation four years earlier, donated £50,000 andsmaller amounts were generated in “a most hearteningresponse in money-raising ingenuity” from RPS members andthe wider photographic community that included a go-cartmarathon and an auction conducted by Lord Snowdon. Thephotographic press ran sponsored competitions while slideshow receipts, lecture fees and book royalties were donatedby camera clubs and individuals until the £300,000 target wasreached. [38]

The RPS moved in to the Octagon on Milsom Street, Bath inMay 1980. It was another six years before Pamela Robertscould reveal “the story of one woman’s epic voyage througha sea of boxes” that it took to catalogue the RPS Collection.[39]

As the RPS approached its 150th anniversary in 2003finances were again tight. With maintenance and storagecosts rising the Society departed the Octagon after twenty-three years for more modest accommodation in Bath and anagreement was reached to move the increasinglyvaluableRPS Collection to the National Museum ofPhotography, Film and Television at Bradford.

While The Times reported the RPS Collection would be“stored as a coherent entity, in conditions more appropriate toits value”, RPS President John Page told Society membersthat combining the RPS Collection with that ofthe NMPFTmade the Bradford collection “the best in theworld”. Page also pointed out that “a member ofthe RPS Council will in the future take one of the three seatson the Museum’s Advisory Board.” [40] [41]

The cost of the move was met by a then record grant of

£3.75 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, together withgrants from the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) andYorkshire Forward, a now defunct government and EU-backed regional development agency.

The director of the NMPFT at the time was Amanda Nevill, aformer RPS Secretary and RPS National Photographic Centreadministrator, who left for the BFI shortly after the arrival ofthe RPS Collection at Bradford and three years before themuseum was renamed the National Media Museum. [42] [43]

The RPS Collection, said Nevill, was “the photographicequivalent of the contents of the Louvre”.

At the V&A seminar in January, Colin Ford admitted that hisfavourite of all Julia Cameron’s images was Iago, the uniqueprint of the Italian model from the Herschel Album, which isnot in the RPS Collection, but had moved with Ford toBradford from the National Portrait Gallery in 1983.

The only known print from a lost negative, Iago was valuedat half a million pounds, perhaps three-quarters of a million,in 2003 by Philippe Garner, the auctioneer who had sold theHerschel Album at Sotheby’s in 1975, said Ford.

There are ninety three prints in the Herschel Album andanother 400,000 objects in the National Media Museumcollection slated to move south again to the V&A in London.It would be hard to put a value on such an archive today.

“What is really sad is the break up of the curatorial team,” aphotographic historian with intimate knowledge ofthe RPSCollection said. “Brian Liddy, oversaw the move ofthe collection from Bath to Bradford in 2003. His knowledgewould be of immense value to the V&A”.

WET PLATES LIKE WET WALLS

A boom in photography followed the Great Exhibition in1851. That same year Frederick Scott Archer’s, wet platecollodion process was published. Unpatented and capable ofproducing a glass negative that could render fine detail andfrom which unlimited copies could be made, the wet platesuperseded the callotype and the daguerrotype and dominatedphotography for thirty years.

Cameron could have achieved technical proficiency in theprocess by following the advise of Sir John Herschel but shemay have been interested in the parallels between the wetplate process and fresco painting, as Professor Mike Weaverobserved in 1984. “The wall had to be damp as a wet plate,”Weaver noted. And as both their mediums dried relativelyquickly – collodion in about ten minutes and plaster in a fewhours – photographer and fresco painter alike may havesacrificed detail and careful finish for speed, simplicity indesign and breadth of effect.

The Renaissance artists endeavoured “to embody moralbeauty in graceful and lovely material forms, which appealdirectly to our hearts and our imaginations, and make usalmost pass over faults of execution,” wrote Sir AustenHenry Layard, who had sought to educate the British publicon Italian frescoes through the Arundel Society, and forwhom the preeminent English fresco painter at the time was

none other than George Frederic Watts, the artistic mentor ofJulia Margaret Cameron. [44]

“Sometimes the technology produces the aesthetic and sometimes the

desire for the aesthetic produces the technology”: Martin Barnes, senior

curator of photographs at the V&A with Paul Strand’s Graflex camera.

Photo © Graham Harrison.

THE BLACK ART

Silver nitrate, however, is distinctly unlike the frescopainter’s harmless pigment and water. Used in medicine andan essential ingredient in the collodion process, and inCameron’s favoured albumen prints, silver nitrate is toxic andleaves a dark stain on skin when exposed to sunlight. Thestain lasts about ten days.

Cameron’s great niece Laura Troubridge, recalled her aunt,“dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from herphotography, (and smelling of them too)”. Julia described herown hands as being “As black as an Ethiopian Queen’s” in aletter to Herschel in which she enquired if he knew of achemical less dangerous than potassium cyanide to removethe stains.

Wet plate photographers were banned from all churches andcathedrals in Britain as they “used to allow the silver stains(from wet plates) to drop from their dark slides on to themarble pavements”, Bill Jay discovered when researching hisessay The Black Art, and Queen Victoria, although a greatenthusiast and collector of photography, prohibited the wetplate process from her palaces as soon as dry platephotography became a practical alternative.

But these inconveniences never detracted from the allure ofthe medium, the seeming magic of it, the alchemy of theblack art. “To have the picture there, breathing on the glass,and to feel every instant that it may vanish or dissolve with aword, with a breath” as Annie Thackeray recognised. JuliaCameron’s Jamin lens was, for her, “as a living thing, withvoice and memory and creative vigour”.

Martin Barnes, at the Press View for the PaulStrandexhibition at the V&A on 16 March, said he recognisedthere is a particular interdependence between the art ofphotography and the science of photography, perhaps uniquein creative media.

“The whole history of photography is a combination of adesire for a particular aesthetic and it’s then controlled by acertain technology and sometimes the technology producesthe aesthetic and sometimes the desire for the aestheticproduces the technology and those two things have continuedsince the daguerreotype,” said the V&A’s Senior Curator inPhotography as he stood in front of Paul Strand’s Graflexcamera dating from 1917.

“So sometimes you appreciate the aesthetic of a picturebecause of the way it’s printed or from the way the camerais made and you understand something about the scale of thepicture because you know that makes a certain size ofnegative that has a certain quality,” said Barnes. “I’m reallythrilled. Strand’s use of different formats of cameras andnegatives and print types: You can marry then all up in theshow. And you can see so much by putting them together.”

GERNSHEIM AT WAR

On 23 April 1975 The Times published a letter from HelmutGernsheim and ran a separate report on his support for ColinFord’s campaign to save the Herschel Album.

Gernsheim said he’d “offered his own collection to the Britishnation in 1951 on condition that a National PhotographicArchive be set up to house it”. And, in a letter of 10 May1975, he said he’d received a “clear rebuff” when he offeredto merge his collection with that of the RPS in 1953.

After twelve years of negotiation the Gernsheim collection of35,000 images was sold to the University of Texas at Austinin 1963.

“Britain could have had them for nothing, but people in thiscountry only appreciate things that cost a lot of money,” saidGernsheim.

When, in 1975, the National Arts Collections Fund donated£5,000 to save the Herschel Album, Gernsheim saw it as “agood omen signifying the long overdue recognition ofphotography as an art medium”.

There was a growing awareness in Britain about the inactionover the creation of a National Collection of Photography, heexplained. “Unfortunately, due to a lack of imagination andforesight our museums did not embrace photography, a fieldin which Britain has produced some of the world’s greatestmasters,” Gernsheim said.

In response to the article in The Times and to Gernsheim’sletter, Roy Strong, who had moved from the National PortraitGallery to become the youngest director of the V&A, repliedthat the V&A’s holdings “are an obvious genesis” for anational collection as the museum had collected photographssince 1852.

“Its range for the 19th century cannot be rivalled by anypublic institution in this country,” said Strong, who called forsupport from photographers, collectors and the public tomake good the collection of 20th century works to matchthose in the United States.

Gernsheim shot back, “May I remind him that in December1972, when still director of the National Portrait Gallery, hehimself publicly believed in the need for the creation of anindependent national collection, an institution thatphotography urgently requires”. Gernsheim called for a“national effort” and for “national interest to be placed beforeinstitutional politics”.

Michael Berkowitz in Jews and Photography inBritain(2015), points out that Gernsheim “both created andunsettled” the history of photography movement in the UK.He was certainly scathing of the RPS in New PhotoVisionand he was never less than blunt in print. “On the onehand Gernsheim exaggerated the degree to which he wasfeted by the establishment. On the other he minimised theextent to which he challenged, and even threatened the field,”Berkowitz writes.

Gernsheim also “played a huge role in the still unwritten storyof the creation of the ‘art market’ for photography”,Berkowitz believes, with the sale of his collection to theUniversity of Texas in 1963 for what is believed to be morethat a million dollars.

Gernsheim’s post-Texas acquisitions went to the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim. “The National MediaMuseum collection is formidable, but it would be far richer ifit held the treasures of Gernsheim that are now housed inAustin and Mannheim,” Berkowitz wrote in his epilogue.

What Berkowitz also revealed was how Gernsheim may haveantagonised both Sir Leigh Ashton, Director of the V&Afrom 1945 to 1955, and Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of theNational Gallery (later of Civilisation fame), without who’senthusiastic support “the photography museum project hadlittle chance of success in Britain”.

Gernsheim managed to get Lady Rothermere to undermineAshton’s resistance to a Victorian salon at the VictorianPhotographs exhibition during the Festival of Britain in 1951,and he misread Clark’s patrician attitude. [45]

Clark had privately supported the idea of a National Museumof Photography based on the Gernsheim collection, but asGernsheim’s disappointments mounted Clark suggested hesimply give his collection to the V&A.

Clark failed to recognise the need for the Gernsheims to earna living and the logic of them curating a collection theythemselves had assembled.

Berkowitz concluded, “They were, in fact, the best if not theonly logical choice as curators. In this instance Clarkgenerated a failure of both sympathy and imagination, whichcost the nation dear.”

BUDGET

When National Media Museum Director Jo Quinton-Tullochfaced a Bradford Council scrutiny committee after theplans of the transfer to the V&A had been announced shesaid that budget restraints meant the NMM had to focus onthe science of photography and film alone.

Art photography, she said, “is not an area that we are goingto curate anymore, and we don’t have the resource to make itactively available”. The collection would be better lookedafter at a new “international photography resource centre” atthe V&A, said Quinton-Tulloch. [46]

On Source Photographic Review Michael Terwey, Head ofCollections at the NMM explained in March, “As part ofnormal museum business we review our collections and wedo transfer things” although he recognised this was on anunprecidented scale. “I think Martin [Barnes] has said beforeits good the national museums should work together in thesekind of ways we think this is a good moment for us to dothis because it makes a lot of organisational sense.

At the Paul Strand exhibition Martin Barnes said he saw thenational collections as a national responsibility. “We can moveon from the cultural imperialism of packaging an exhibitionup and sending it to Newcastle, say. There has to be moreinvolvement, more of a dialogue around why does thisexhibition go there and is there university research going onin Newcastle that can illuminate things that we have in thecollections?” said Barnes. “We can genuinely have a dialoguearound an academic programme, an exhibition programme, alearning programme.”

What has been forgotten, Barnes pointed out, are the touringexhibitions and collaborations with museums the V&A hasbeen involved with outside of London over the last ten years.“I counted about twenty-six different exhibitions and they’vegone to every town museum around the UK, we’ve had oneand half million people who’ve come to see V&Aphotographic exhibitions outside of London in the last tenyears,” Barnes said.

Funding, however, remains “a bit chicken and egg”, Barnessaid. “Plans will become refined and developed once weknow the scope of the collections and what the focus ofthose collections are.” He thought the Royal PhotographicSociety Collection should remain a distinct entity.

“It makes sense it doesn’t loose its provenance and doesn’tget split up,” said Barnes. “But I’m very open for discussionto see what is the right thing for the collections.”

A REFUGE FOR DESTITUTE COLLECTIONS

The V&A has been collecting photographs since its inceptionin 1852. In 1864 the museum bought a number of JuliaMargaret Cameron’s prints and gave the photographer herfirst and only museum exhibition in the autumn of 1865. In

1868, when the museum granted Cameron the use of tworooms as a portrait studio she became, Marta Weiss said, themuseum’s very first artist-in-residence.

The V&A exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron, curated byWeiss, was structured around four of Cameron’s letters tothe museum’s founder Sir Henry Cole who, in May 1865, satfor Cameron at Little Holland House. “A German girl held anumbrella over me,” Cole wrote in his diary.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was Henry Cole’s idea. Theextraordinary success of the exhibition led to better designeducation in Britain and to the founding of the SouthKensington Museum which in 1909 was split into the ScienceMuseum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.Cole describedhis institution as “a refuge for destitutecollections”.

If the V&A is the latest refuge for the RPS Collection and forother photographic art works and objects of historicalimportance, as now seems likely, the inevitable question ishow can the work required to catalogue, store and presentthe collection to the public be funded? Cataloguing alonemight take thirty years the Telegraph suggested.

From the RPS campaign in 1978 that made possible the moveof their collection from London to Bath, to the recordHeritage Lottery Fund grant which helped pay for theCollection to be moved from Bath to Bradford in 2003, to anumber of eye-catching makeovers at Bradford and on to2013 with the opening of the Media Space at the ScienceMuseum at a cost of £4.5 million, the future of whichappears to be uncertain now it’s original purpose toshowcase the best of the Bradford collection to a rich andinfluential London audience is unlikely to continue: All ofthese ambitious, costly and time-consuming enterprises haveproved temporary.

THE MYTH OF ACCESSIBILITY

Photographer David Hoffman, who has been involved in artsgroups for forty years believes that the conditions thatinevitably accompany government funding stifle that essentialspark of brilliance that brings lasting success.

The Arts Council, Hoffman said in an email, was responsiblefor the destruction of vibrant arts organisations as early asthe late 1970s.

“Technology, particularly desktop publishing, madepublishing and graphic design cheap and straightforward.Suddenly deprofessionalisation was the buzz word and‘community involvement’ became the funders’ patronisingmantra,” Hoffman said in an email.

“Arts organisations were required to show how engaged with‘local people’ they were and concepts such as skill,application, imagination and originality were dismissed asarrogant devices that excluded those who lacked them.”

“To be funded, work had to be accessible to all,” saidHoffman.

“Content was no longer relevant and challenging work was

seen as insulting the hard of thinking. Footfall became kingand the easiest way to bulk up visitor numbers was schooltrips.

“Innovative, dynamic and successful groups such asCamerawork that had sprung up as art for social change hadtheir efforts diverted into getting the numbers through thedoors that would bring in the ArtsCo cheque. They becamedull and irrelevant,” Hoffman said.

“The creative founders left and administrators took theirplace. Vast sums were spent on ‘community darkrooms’ thatwere, and remain, unused. Leaving serious work unfunded.

“In 2008 a colleague and I went to a “Photo Forum” at FourCorners in Bethnal Green. We found about sixty shoutystudents, pissed on grant-funded booze, giggling andchattering away through the shows without attention to orappreciation of the photos being shown. The lone exceptionwas a guy in the front row sitting quietly and attentively andsurreptitiously taking photos of any nudes included in theprojection,” said Hoffman.

“We were so angry that we walked out and started ourownPhoto-Forum. Eight years on it’s stronger than ever,refusing all external funding, running to packed houses andshowing the work of some of the best photographersworking today.”

BREAKING THE ADDICTION

Shortly after becoming Head of the Bradford museum in1983 Colin Ford went to Freshwater Bay on the Isle ofWight, where he discovered Mary Hillier’s grave in thechurchyard and two empty negative boxes with thedescendants of the Cameron’s gardeners. One box was fornegatives from Cameron’s first camera. The other for hersecond larger camera in which was written in Cameron’shand “No. 24 Christina Rossetti profile”.

Ford said that no other mention of the encounter has beenfound, let alone a print.

“More words have been written and spoken about JuliaMargaret Cameron than perhaps any other photographer inthe history of the medium,” said Ford. “Yet there remainhuge unanswered questions about her.”

Ford said he didn’t “get” Cameron when he saw the HerschelAlbum for the first time in 1974 but once he did “she tookover my life” and triggered his campaign to start a nationalmuseum of photography in Britain. Ford adapted andpromoted an idea Helmut Gernsheim had been promoting forthirty years and succeeding in establishing the NationalMuseum of Photography, Film and Television.

David Hoffman’s view is that the “corrosion of the organic,spirited spontaneous arts movement” by unimaginativefunding bodies continues to stifle progress today. “Our artsorganisations must break their addiction to fat-cat chequessigned by ignorant bean counters and rediscover creativity,”Hoffman said.

Another serious problem is a future with a generation of

young people unlikely to receive a proper visual artseducation. Frances Morris, the newly installed director atTate Modern talking about the need for diversity in theartstold the Guardian, “Education has to be central. If wedon’t have a proper visual arts education, all the other thingsthat we are told to do, like diversification of our audience,will never happen,” said Morris who also pointed out, “In thenineteenth century [the Tate] didn’t buy photography. It tookus over a hundred years to catch up”.

“MY PRECIOUS NEGATIVE”

Before the Camerons sailed for Ceylon Julia left many of hernegatives with the Autotype Company in London for copyingand printing. According to Gernshiem, they were still withthe company when it was destroyed by bombing during theSecond World War. All but two of those that remained, ColinFord believes, may have simply faded away.

Cameron, herself certainly saw her negatives as “fatallyperishable” and there was always a necessity for her, “toprint as actively as I can whilst my precious negative is yetgood”.

The fading negative, like the passing of time is not unlike thefading possibility we have to create an inspiring andpermanent place for Britain’s photographic heritage as theartefacts accumulate and become increasingly burdened bytheir own value.

Names more inspiring than “media museum” or “internationalresource centre”, which doom an idea to failure in the longterm, are required.

Digital photography, a medium Martin Barnes describes as“chameleon” has a role but to understand the history ofanalogue photography there has to be a physical element thatis in touch, if no longer with the chemistry, then with theoptics, with seeing and understanding how we see and whatit is we catch when we catch the moment.

Martin Barnes told Source Photographic Review that ifBradford “had been funded better and resourced anddecentralised and supported genuinely by government thenyou would have had a different situation”.

Which means that the museums are telling us we are wherewe are.

• • •

• So, what’s next? The National Collections Debate. OnFriday 22 April the National Photography Symposium willexamine the National Media Museum’s decision to give amajor part of its photography archive, including the RoyalPhotographic Society collection, to the V&A in London, andthe consequences and possibilities that has opened up.

For the fist time since the announcements, representativesfrom all the parties concerned will be present to answerquestions in public.

Speakers include Colin Ford, founding Head of the National

Museum of Photography, Film and Television; Martin

Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria and Albert

Museum; Michael Terwey, Head of Collections &

Exhibitions at the National Media Museum; Michael

Pritchard, Director-General of The Royal Photographic

Society; Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery,

Bradford; Francis Hodgson, Professor in the Culture of

Photography, University of Brighton; Jo Booth, artist andresearcher.

Sarah Fisher, Director of Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Paul

Herrmann, Director of Redeye and Graham Harrison ofPhoto Histories will also take part.

• And? There will be a further opportunity to study thecontexts of Cameron’s life and work in the late spring. The

exhibition Painting with Light: Art and Photography from

the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age, at Tate Britainfrom May, is billed to reveal just how vital painting and earlyphotography were to one another by hanging the works ofCameron and her photographic contemporaries including theLondon-born New Yorker Zaida Ben Yusuf (1869-1933),beside paintings by Turner and Whistler and Rossetti. It’sbeen a long time coming.

• The 1970s revival: The revival in interest in Victorianphotography probably started in the United States as a resultof reprinting photographs from the American Civil War(1861-65) during the centenary celebrations, TheTimesreported in ‘Objects of collectors’ craze being savedfor nation’ on 19 April 1975. A relatively common book suchas John Thompson and Adolphe Smith’s Street Life inLondon(1877-78), which was worth about £50 in 1970would have cost £1,600 in March 1974 and £3,000 in March1975, The Times stated.

1972: From Today Painting is Dead, V&A exhibition backedby the Arts Council.

1973: NPG buys 258 Hill and Adamson portraits at a cost of£32,000.

1974: NPG buys Lewis Carroll album of portraits with thehelp of Kodak Ltd; Green leather album of the work ofCameron and other photographers including Rejlander sold atSotheby’s for £40,000 to private buyer; Herschel Album, soldat Sotheby’s for £52,000, subsequently bought forthe NPGfollowing public subscription.

1975: The Real Thing, British Photographs 1840 -1950touring exhibition backed by the Arts Council.

• • •

NOTES on Julia Margaret Cameron and Britain’s

Photographic Heritage

[1] Colin Ford (b 1934) is joint-editor of Julia MargaretCameron: The Complete Photographs (2003) and author

ofJulia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer ofGenius (also 2003).

[2] Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) made a significantcontribution to early photography. The son of the astronomerWilliam Herschel, John understood optics and chemistry andinvestigated the properties of the fixing agent sodiumthiosulphate (hypo) as early as 1819. Herschel is creditedwith creating the words “photography” and “snapshot” andfor introducing the terms “positive” and “negative” tophotography. He produced a glass negative of his father’stelescope at Slough in 1839. In 1842 Herschel invented thecyanotype sun-printing process which he encouraged thebotanist Anna Atkins to use to record her algae collection.Her Photographs of British Algae: CyanotypeImpressionsproduced in 1843, is believed to be the first bookproduced by a photographic process and the firstphotographic work by a woman.

[3] Ford is, “perhaps the only UK curator of photographswho one could have imagined at the Harry Ransom CenterorMOMA or the Bibliothèque Nationale or any of the otherreally proper photographic collections.” Francis Hodgson,2013. Ford, assisted by Amateur Photographer was thedriving force that elicited 4,000 donations from companiesand individuals to save the Herschel Album. Cheques weremade payable to ‘The Cameron Collection’ and sent to theRoyal Bank of Scotland on Charing Cross Road, LondonSW1.

[4] The Herschel Album had been bought at auction byRobert Mapplethorp’s mentor and lover Sam Wagstaff who,denied his prize by the refusal of an export licence by theReviewing Committee for the Export of Arts, neverthelessassembled one of the finest private collections of photographsin the world. Wagstaff could see and understand what hewas seeing and was able to verbalise it, according tophotography dealer Robert Hershkowitz. “Sam was trying tofigure out the aesthetics of photography.” From Thevoracious eye of Sam Wagstaff by Liz Jobey, FT Magazine,4 March 2016. In 1984 Wagstaff sold his collection of30,000 photographs to the J Paul Getty Museum for $4.5million. The Thrill of the Chase: the Wagstaff Collection ofPhotographs is at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from 15March to 31 July 2016 and the Wadsworth AtheneumMuseum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut from 10 September to11 December 2016.

[5] Two years before, in December 1972, the Rev. John Wallof the RPS wrote to The Times about the “increasing valueand significance of photographic collections and the frenzy ofactivity to secure them” by American buyers and called forphotographs to be added to the works of art requiring anexport licence and for the establishment of a NationalPhotographic Archive. The Rev. Wall was working on aDirectory of British Photographic Collections at the time.Page 17,The Times, 5 December 1972.

[6] “When Ford opened Bradford, it had something like eightgalleries, showing everything from emerging photographersto the most established” wrote Francis Hodgson. “It was inan odd place as far as London culture-vultures wereconcerned, but it really was the national museum of

photography. After his departure, a lot of that concentrationwas diluted.”

[7] Front Row, BBC Radio 4, Thursday, 10 March 2016.

[8] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) entryon Julia Margaret Cameron by Helen Barlow, 2004.

[9] “In 1826 [Charles] had an illegitimate son and in 1828 anillegitimate daughter, both by a German woman who laterreturned to Germany”. Julia and Charles married in Calcuttaon 1 February 1838. ODNB entry on Charles Hay Cameronby Leslie Stephen, 2008.

[10] “Queened it” comes from pages 62-67 of The MagicImage (1974) by Beaton and Gail Buckland. Their entry onCameron is one of the largest for any photographer.

[11] The Camerons lived in Tunbridge Wells, East Sheen andthen Putney before moving to Freshwater on the Isle ofWhite in 1860. In Tunbridge Wells they lived near HenryTaylor (1800–1886), Charles’ friend and colleague from theColonial Office. Taylor was also a poet and playwright andbecame one of Julia’s most frequent photographic models,appearing in thirty-two of her photographs in all. He isresponsible for introducing the Camerons to Tennyson.

[12] Except for the actress Ellen Terry, briefly anddisastrously Watts’ wife at seventeen, who described LittleHolland House as “a hornet’s nest”.

[13] In 1857 a copy of Rejlander’s large allegoricalcomposite-print The Two Ways of Life was bought by QueenVictoria for Prince Albert who hung it in his study.Containing nudes and printed from over thirty negatives,Rejlander’s work was considered in art circles the highestlevel which photography could obtain. Helmut Gernsheim, AConcise History of Photography (1971).

[14] The albumen print of Julia Margaret Cameron and herwatchcase, circa 1856, is in a private collection. It wasreproduced on page 18 of Julia Margaret Cameron: TheComplete Photographs (2003), by Julian Cox and Colin Ford.

[15] In 2013 the Signor Album, the volume of prints by otherphotographers assembled by Cameron for her mentor GeorgeFrederic Watts in 1857, was sold to a foreign buyer for£121,250. Despite having an export licence deferred on thegrounds that the album was of outstanding significance forthe study of nineteenth century photography, and particularlyof Julia Margaret Cameron, it was not saved for the nation,indeed, its potential loss received scant publicity unlike ColinFord’s efforts to save the Herschel Album in 1975. TheSignor Album was the most important Cameron object tohave left the country, Ford told the Julia Margaret Cameronat 200 conference on 15 Jaunary 2016. “A lot of historicalquestions… might have been answered by the SignorAlbum,” said Ford.

[16] Bohemian culture was popularised by Henri Murger’scollection of short stories, Scenes de la Vie deBohème(1845). The term “bohemian” was first used inBritain in Thackerary’s 1848 satire, Vanity Fair. The book’smain character is an unscrupulous adventuress of Anglo-

French origin called Becky Sharp.

[17] The Jamin lens consisted of two separate groups ofelements. It had rack and pinion focussing and a fixedaperture of f 3.6, a design invented by the Hungarianmathematician Joseph Max Petzval in 1840. Althoughastigmatism and curvature of field were marked, the wideaperture and short depth of field made the Petzval design idealfor commercial portraiture. The name ‘Jamin’ indicates thelens was made before 1860 as Mossieur Jamin’s companywas taken over by his plant manager Darlot that year. Lenseswere engraved Jamin-Darlot for one year and simply Darlotthereafter. A Darlot Portrait Lens.

[18] Cameron used her second, larger camera to photographher grandson as early as August 1865 and she registered anumber of the larger-negative prints for copyright thatNovember. It was previously believed she acquired thecamera in 1866. Marta Weiss, Note 76, page 45, JuliaMargaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delightand startle the world.

[19] On 24 November 1864 Cameron wrote to the EdinburghPhotographic Society “I propose sending 12 portraits, chieflyof eminent men [including Tennyson and Trollope] and someof these 12 are very beautiful fancy pictures all from thelife… Regarding their excellence, I can assure you that theyare pronounced by the greatest Artists in London ‘to beamongst the finest things in existence’”.

[20] Julia Margaret Cameron: An Appraisal, Bill Jay , 1978.

[21] “Mike Weaver, in a key work of Cameron scholarship,published in 1984, has placed Cameron’s conception ofgenius and beauty within a specifically Christian framework,as indicative of the sublime and the sacred.” HelenBarlow,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

[22] There is another hand holding an umbrella in the full-length portrait Lady Elcho / A Dantesque Vision taken at thesame location in the same year.

[23] In Note 10 on page 43 of Julia Margaret Cameron:Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle theworld, Weiss quotes from an article titled ’Long Exposures’in The Photographic News, 19 December 1873.

[24] Rejlander printed from separate negatives onto a singlesheet of light-sensitive paper, Robinson used photomontageor “cut and paste” to assemble the components of his images.

[25] The Rapid Rectilinear lens designed by John HenryDallmeyer was corrected for spherical and chromaticaberration, ie aplanatic. Shut down, the lens was sharp butwith the aperture wide open as Cameron tended to use it,sharpness fell off markedly from the centre. Gernsheim,referencing HP Emerson, states that if she had wanted softfocus she could have bought Dallmeyer’s soft focus portraitlens rather than the general purpose Rapid Rectilinear.

[26] Note 77, page 45, Julia Margaret Cameron:Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle theworld, Marta Weiss.

[27] Founded in 1848 the Arundel Society was named after“the collector earl”, Thomas Howard of Arundel (1586 –1646), who imported artworks including classical statuesfrom Greece and Italy to Britain, probably the first person todo so. His collection of marble carvings was eventually left toOxford University.

[28] Of Huguenot descent, Layard “hated humbug andcasuistry, and had a genuine and intense sympathy with theoppressed, especially those suffering under clerical rule. Inthat sense he was a man of the people… his zest,imagination, creativity, and idealism made him an importantfigure in a dazzling variety of fields, an unusually cultivatedand vigorous all-rounder even by the high standards of hisage.” Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) by JonathanParry, ODNB.

[29] Layard married Mary Enid Evelyn (1843–1912) on 9March 1869 at St George’s, Hanover Square, London. ACameron print titled Mrs Enid Layard was sold at auction atBonhans, London on 12 November 2012 for £10,000.

[30] From an Island Part 2, VII, pages 59-61. AnneThackerary’s novella is dedicated to Alfred and EmilyTennyson.

[31] Larry Schaaf is director of the William Henry Fox TalbotCatalogue Raisonné at the Bodleian Library, publication ofwhich is expected later this year.

[32] Life and death at sea: The first Pattle daughter, AdelineMaria, died aged 24 off the coast of Indonesia on 26 May1836. Her mother, also called Adeline Maria, died on thevoyage bringing her husband’s body to England on 11November 1845. She was 52. Maria Theodora, the fifthPattle daughter and mother of Julia Jackson, was born off thecoast of Kenya on 7 July 1818.

[33] “ISLE of WIGHT, Freshwater – For SALE, by PrivateContract, the valued FREEHOLD PROPERTY, known asDimbola-lodge and Sunnyside, the well-known residences ofCharles Hay Cameron, Esq., and Mrs. Julia MargaretCameron, beautifully situate within 400 yards of the admiresFreshwater Bay, within five minutes walk of the post andtelegraph office, a mile distant from two churches, andcommanding an open view of the sea and Down. The housesare most desirably placed for a gentleman’s residence, or welladapted for a high-class school, or for a first-rate boringhouse, being connected internally, and can be occupiedtogether or separately. They contain five spacious receptionrooms and 20 principle and secondary bed rooms andexcellent offices. A detached building in the lawn has beenused as a theatre or lecture room, and is well suited for agallery or billiard room. The pleasure grounds are prettilydisposed in croquet and tennis lawn, and are well plantedwith choice evergreen and other trees. There is stableaccommodation, and the supply of water is good. Immediatepossession may be had.” Advert placed in The Times, 13 July1878 and 21 August 1878.

[34] Prices at the Serendipity Gallery ranged from fifteenshillings to one pound ten shillings for a Cameron print. Theexhibition ran from 23 June to 31 July 1904.

[35] Gerald Duckworth published two books of Coburnportraits: Men of Mark (1913) and More Men ofMark(1922).

[36] The Octagon’s hall, the lone survivor of a ‘chapel ofease’ in the city, opened in 1767 as ‘the only safe place ofworship in Bath as there are no steps to climb and no bodiesburied below’. Sir William Herschel, John Herschel’s fatherand a Bath resident, played the organ at the Octagon when hewasn’t surveying the night skies.

[37] ‘Cash appeal for photographic centre in Bath’. Page4,The Times, 14 June 1978.

[38] Page 71, Volume 119, The Photographic Journal,May/June 1979 and ‘Annual Report for the Council, Yearending 31 December 1979’, Page 124, Volume 120 ThePhotographic Journal 1980. The RPS also gave “a mostimpressive display of its historic treasures” at the DailyExpress sponsored Photoworld photographic fair at Olympiain 1979 where “thousands of photographic enthusiasts”attracted to the Society’s Milestones of Photography standwere told about “the Society and its plans for the future”.

[39] Article ‘Discovering the RPS Collection:The RPSLibrarian/Prints & Books … tells of what she foundwhilst cataloguing the RPS collection’, page 170 (96),Volume 126,The Photographic Journal, April 1986.

[40] ‘Royal Variety Act’, a five-star review of the exhibitionUnknown Pleasures at the NMM, Bradford by JoannaPitman, The Times, page 17, 28 January 2003.

[41] President’s Report, page 37 (67), Volume143 RPSJournal, March 2003.

[42] “Is it, I ask, as has been said, an octopus with nonervous system? Pause. “I think Amanda Neville [theincoming director, imported from the lively National Museumof Photography, Film and Television in Bradford] is going tobe a real force and a real leader.” Andrew Billenmeets BFIChairman Anthony Minghella. Page 4, The Times,19 May 2003.

[43] Amanda Neville was Secretary of the RPS from 1990 to1994 and ran the RPS National Photographic Centreexhibition space from 1985.

[44] Page 20 and Note 7 page 142, A.H.Layard, ‘Publicationsof the Arundel Society: Fresco Painting’, QuarterlyReviewCIV (October 1858), Julia Margaret Cameron 1815-1879(1984) by Mike Weaver.

[45] The Victorian Photographs exhibition at the V&A duringthe Festival of Britain was Gernsheim’s idea and execution.V&A Director Sir Leigh Ashton was against the idea of aVictorian salon being included in the show. Gernsheim gotAshton’s friend Lady Rothermenre to declare it “Wonderful”.Berkowitz wonders whether Ashton resented Gernsheim’smanipulation of the situation to achieve his ends. VictorianPhotographs ran from 1 May to 11 October 1951.

[46] In My Message To Bradford, a blog entry onthe NMMweb site, NMM Director Jo Quinton-Tulloch

admitted to a further cut in running costs and “the difficultjob of making some reductions in staffing”.

Julia Margaret Cameron and Britain’s Photographic Heritage

All photos and text © 2016 Graham Harrison