I was a camera

Julia Margaret Cameron is hip. This would not have astonished her – she had every confidence in her vision as a photographer – but for many decades she has been regarded merely as the female face of the male act, someone who created pretty-pretty photographs of allegorical or religious scenes, with the odd Great Man thrown in as a make-weight.

This may be changing. A Cameron exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery this week which will give an opportunity to reassess the work; with From Life Victoria Olsen gives a look at the life. The life was, in many ways, separate from the art. Cameron worked on photography intensively from 1864 to 1875. She lived, however, from 1815 to 1879, and From Life does not scant on the other 54 years.

Julia Margaret Pattle was born in Calcutta to an eccentric Indian-born employee of the East India Company and his wife, an Indian-born descendant of a Frenchman (and, at four generations’ remove, a Bengali, never mentioned by the family). She was sent to her French grandmother in Versailles as a child and returned to India only as a young woman looking for marriage. Charles Cameron was eminently suitable, a barrister working with Macaulay in codifying India’s penal laws. Their decade in India was perhaps socially their peak. After their return to England in 1848, despite several sisters having married well, the Camerons’ lives became one long round of rented houses, borrowed money and irritatingly extravagant and unrealistic plans for financial stability.

Photography was one. Cameron claimed frequently that she hoped to make money from her images, and certainly she did sell regularly. But her position as a professional-amateur was difficult, the cash never outweighed the expenses, and eventually she and her husband were forced to retire to their unprofitable coffee estate in Ceylon, where they are now buried.