Famous Photographer #2

Julia Margaret Cameron

A WOMAN BEFORE HER TIME...

The pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815. From 1860 to 1875 she made Dimbola house her home and workplace. She turned an old hen house into a studio, and by photographing everyone from the famous to local children and her own maids, Julia established the photographic portrait as an art form in its own right. Her influence extended from early C20th Hollywood to the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were her great-nieces), to late C20th photographers like David Bailey and Robert Mapplethorpe. Recently, both Patti Smith and Annie Leibovitz have visited Dimbola to walk in Julia’s footsteps.

On to the back lawn of Dimbola were herded, often protesting and sometimes in bizarre costume, the cream of the, as she described them, “poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens”. Julia would photograph all day long and then organise “impromptu plays and dances in the big, panelled hall, and partners would come out on to the lawn and dance under the stars”. Her last word “beautiful” was uttered on her death-bed looking out across the balcony to the starry sky, half a world away on the family tea estates in Ceylon.


Source  www.dimbola.co.uk

Charles Darwin

Sir John Hershel

Hiawatha