Julia Margaret Cameron: influence and intimacy

Nice exhibition at the Science Museum to mark the bicentary of the birth of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

It deconstructed an album she’d given to Sir John Herschel in 1864 containing one year of her work with more added three years later. It had most of the iconic photographs in it. It has been described as the “finest album of Victorian photos ever created”. In the early 80s the book and photos was conserved and in this exhibition the pictures are hung in the order they were found in the book with Cameron’s original annotations. The cover is included which Cameron had had especially carved from wood.

I love the over serious whimsy of many of the pictures such that of two women recreating a scene from the Elgin Marbles. Her poor maid Mary Ann Hiller appears in a number of these! There are lots of lovely pictures of Virginia Woolf’s mother Julia Jackson with her wonderful large eyes.  And of course my favourite was there, an Iago using an Italian model from a colony of professional Italian models in London.

May I recommend at this point Lynne Truss’s wonderful book “Tennyson’s Gift” which satirises life on the Victorian Isle of Wight where Cameron worked. It reads like a big joke but actually, as you can see from this exhibition is just a slightly heightened version of the truth!

Closes on 28 March 2016.

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