 |
|
|
|
Art Review Archives:
|
Julia Margaret Cameron's Women
Art Institute of Chicago Julia Margaret Cameron is one of those early photographers we tend to forget about today, because photography today has been so influenced by Ansel Adams and the Westons. Julia Margaret Cameron embarked on a path in early photography that aimed to create a realm of photography that used the medium to utmost artistic sensibilities. Often using Rembrant, Titian, Giotto, DaVinci, Reubens and Durer as influences, Cameron's photographs are painterly in their soft-focus and classically expressive in their composition, poses, and facial expressions.
Derided by her peers for the same qualities that today we admire and praise, Cameron was a part of the movement in Victorian England that aimed to create a medium that aimed for higher purposes: not just to amuse, but to also instruct, purify and ennoble. Sir William Newton, a painter and photographer lectured to the Photographic Society in London in 1853, and talked of 'Photography in an Artistic View' and called for photographs that were more suggestion than statements of fact. Cameron's photographs fit this description to a tee. However, what makes Cameron's photographs most intriguing is the fact that she came about her style not just due to fashion and style of the day, but that she came to the style on her own.
Cameron was a well read and educated society woman. Her husband almost constantly abroad, and her children grown up or away at school. Cameron was 49 years old before she even picked up the camera that her children gave her as a gift. It took her a year of trial and error to make what she described as her 'first success' and three more years to become proficient to the point she was comfortable with embarking on her artistic pursuit of photography. The chemistry of photography at the time was still immature, and to master the process of applying emulsion to a wet plate was a monumental task. Cameron did not have all the niceties of today's darkrooms to produce her art, and washed her prints and plates in their final rinse in a well-- which accounts for the many scratches and dust marks we see in her prints.
Aside from all the history, what amazes me most about her work is the raw artistic sensibility of it. Cameron's work doesn't just emulate the old master painters. She adds some of her own Christian righteousness and photographic philosophy to her work; photography to Cameron was 'mortal but yet divine.' Cameron doesn't succumb to an infatuation with the mother and child themes as many women have. This exhibit even underscores this point by focusing on her photographs of women. Cameron's women are not the frivolous, superstitious, or foolish women that many Pre-Raphaelites would portray as women of the time, nor are they the weaker, subdued, fragile things that Victorian England would prefer to see. Julia Margaret Cameron's women are ennobled beings who are strong willed, free, and beautiful in spirit. Some are pensive and thoughtful. Many look as though they are on the verge of revelation or sleep. We can imagine that some are all awakening, and we see their expression of recognition and sense of awareness.
A friend recently made an excellent point about art. He said that it is much easier to create something to denigrate or depress our spirit, and that it is not as easy to create something that uplifts. When I thought about this I realized just how right he was. This could well describe the rift that separates good art from truly great art. Cameron's work is truly great because it ennobles the spirit. At times, it seems derivative, but upon closer inspection, we notice something more about her subjects that painting does not always capture, and it's not just a moment in time. It is spirit. It is life. --Richard Donagrandi |
Home | Art Reviews | Bookstore | eArtist | Galleries | RSS
Search | About ArtScope.net | Advertise on ArtScope.net | Contact
