Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs

According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s great-nieces,
“we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.” This
is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815–1879),
who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than twelve hundred
images during a fourteen-year career. Living at the height of the Victorian
era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively
new medium of photography, promoting her own art though exhibition and sale,
and pursuing the eminent personalities of her age—Alfred Tennyson, Charles
Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, and others—as subjects for her lens. For the first
time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century
artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné.

            In addition
to a complete catalogue of Cameron’s photographs, there is information on her
life and times, initial experiments, artistic aspirations, techniques,
small-format images, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of
inspiration. Also provided are a selected bibliography of publications on
Cameron, a list of exhibitions of her work held both in her time as well as our
own, and a summary of important collections where her pictures can be found.