Artificial life | 19 November 2015

One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and more impatient until he came to a study of the scientist Sir John Herschel in which the subject’s hair stood up ‘like a halo of fireworks’. At this point, Ruskin slammed the portfolio shut and Cameron thumped him violently on the back, exclaiming, ‘John Ruskin, you are not worthy of photographs!’ He was indeed smackingly wrong to dismiss her work, as visitors to an exhibition at the V&A celebrating the 200th anniversary of her birth will be able to see for themselves.

There are multiple ironies underlying this spat (they happily made up by lunchtime). Ruskin disapproved — officially speaking, at least — of photography. Discoursing on the popular belief that ‘the camera cannot lie’, he remarked that photographs were true in a sense. ‘But this truth of mere transcript has nothing to do with Art properly so called; and will never supersede it.’

A complication is that Ruskin himself had collected hundreds of daguerreotypes of landscape and architectural subjects, often collaborating closely with the photographers who had taken them. Some of these very closely resembled his own watercolour drawings. There was a further paradox. In a way his complaint about Julia Margaret Cameron’s pictures was that they had too much to do with art, but not the variety he favoured.

Ruskin admired the close-focus style of Pre-Raphaelites such as Millais — which was in turn heavily influenced by photography — and painted in that manner himself. Cameron, however, reflected an entirely different kind of painting. Dante Gabriel Rossetti — an astute observer if a bad speller — put his finger on just what that was when he thanked her for ‘the most beautiful photograph’ she had sent him, adding, ‘It is like a Lionardo.’