An article in the New York Times about an exhibition of the work of Julia Margaret Cameron at the Morgan Library & Museum was a nice excuse to look again at her work. The reviewer is Arthur Lebow, who wrote an exhaustive biography of Diane Arbus.
Cameron has always been one of my guides to good portraiture. It seems amazing she was able to produce such outstanding images so early after the invention of photography, and with such primitive equipment and techniques.
I think that the modern day appeal of Cameron's portraits rests largely on her posing techniques in which her sitters were placed very close to the camera and dressed simply in a way that minimizes the distraction of period styles.
There is a good selection of Cameron's work in Masters of Photography by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. I have the first edition which was published in 1958. Looking for the book on Amazon I found that there is a new edition. The listing includes a long statement asserting that the contents are now in the public domain, which seems rather curious. Perhaps the original publisher just abandoned the copyright?
Wikipedia has quite a thorough biography of Cameron and her career in photography which only began around the age of 48 when her daughter gifted her a camera.
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