Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) was one of the most important and innovative photographers, criticised in her lifetime for her unconventional techniques. Right now a new exhibition with a modern photography is being staged at the National Portrait Gallery. She is now celebrated as a pioneering portraitist and to mark the bicentenary of her birth and the 150th anniversary of her first museum exhibition, the only one in her lifetime, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1865, Bibliophile has got hold of this rare 2015 exhibition catalogue. Drawing on the V&A's significant collection of photographs acquired directly from Cameron and letters she wrote to the museum's founding director, Curator Marta Weiss tells the story of Cameron's artistic development and presents for the first time a group of photographs recently revealed to have belonged to her friend and mentor the artist G. F. Watts which shed light on previously unacknowledged aspects of Cameron's experimental approach. There is a modernity and contemporary spirit to her visual language and themes at a time when photography was still in its infancy. Her delicacy of touch is shown in her portraits of naked children, beautiful women with long flowing hair decorated with flowers and women portrayed not only as seductresses and paramours but as caring mothers and grandmothers with children and grandchildren, affection, caressing and kissing, and in home theatricals with mythological, biblical and allegorical scenes. She attached heavy swans' wings to children's shoulders and created great beauty in such tableau as King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther in Apocrypha, the bearded old man, the beauty resting on the shoulders of another woman captured so artistically. Simple and beautiful is the first example entitled Annie, 1864, a little girl of around seven years with unbrushed hair gazing wistfully as are many of these subjects. Page after page of sepia and black and white beautifully reproduced full page photographs. 224pp, marbled endpapers, cloth binding and silver tooling for the title, 26 x 22cm. The paperback sells at £30 and we have the glamorous hardback first edition.
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