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Annals of My Glasshouse at the National Gallery of Victoria over Summer 2001-2002 was an exciting exhibition for anyone interested in feminist art.
Here was a woman artist taking centre stage in a major exhibition, borrowed from an overseas collection in which a range of work provided the opportunity to explore the aesthetic of a major woman international artist in depth. Gallery visitors could experience a woman artist who is particularly important.
Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was one of the most influential of all female creative artists in Britain in the nineteenth century. Cameron’s work excels on all definitions of creativity. It ranks as radical art, as innovative photography, as a record of the quintessential expression of the values of its era. Her photographs are a quintessential “Victorian” art, romantic and escapist and poetic. Above all they have the individuality and presence of “great art”. Whereas conventional criticism has frequently placed women artists as behind the vanguard, as copyists, Cameron is a woman artist whose work has shaped the subsequent directions of her media.
Victorian is frequently used by some people to denote a culture that is old fashioned, repressive and regressive. Yet another school of thought regards the Victorians as the first postmodern generation. The first generation who began to conceive of mankind as operated by complex psychological impulses who do not see the world as either divinely appointed or as a giant clockwork. Cameron’s work, although not modern in its format and appearance is often a harbinger of the modern in its content and its aspirations. Cameron stays with and expresses Victorian cultural and pictorial conventions, but she also subverts and overturns these conventions at the same time. Cameron’s work is particularly rich in its ability to provide bridges between our experience and the work of the Victorians. So many of the issues raised by Cameron’s work are so familiar to us that we may even forget how radical her concepts were
The exciting thing about Cameron’s artistry is that it is so unexpected. There is nothing in her background or previous experience which would suggest that Cameron would be anything other than a pleasant hobbyist. No one would have predicted that Cameron would be an artist who has been consistently respected since the beginning of historical and curatorial surveys of early photography.
Yet as I said Cameron is not only a “good” artist, she fulfills the quintessential idea of the radical practitioner, expanding the boundaries and working through directions indicated by their own experiments. At the time her art was seen by some conventional people as slipshod in its lack of attention to technical perfection of the photographic technique – sometimes you may see dust or finger prints on her photographs
The Photographic Journal for 15 February 1865 reads:
"Mrs. Cameron exhibits her series of out of focus portraits of celebrities. We must give this lady credit for daring originality but at the expense of all other photographic qualities."We must remember that none of the throwaway convenience that we associate with photography existed in Cameron’s day. She did not go the chemist or K-mart to buy a roll of film or have a camera that adjusted itself to different lighting conditions and nor was she advised what setting for the shutter speed – all this was to be worked out by detailed experiment and observation. In addition, Cameron had to coat her plates and then develop them herself. She was using smelly, messy and toxic chemicals – that was of course a contradiction in terms of the Victorians' idea of the upper and middle class woman as a passive and refined creature, living in a beautiful home with servants to take care of tiresome or unpleasant work.
Many of those who sat as her models recalled that it was a difficult experience. Cameron was a larger than life character with the confidence of a modernist innovator. She ordered her sitters about and hectored and bribed them, demanded great feats of concentration from them. She liked using very large glass plates and subdued lighting on her sitters. Both of these factors meant that her pictures took longer than most contemporary Victorian photographs. Thus she demanded that her sitters stayed still for up to five minutes but curiously very few of her pictures show any sense of strain or difficulty. Many of them exude a sort of beatific angelic serenity. Sometimes the experience became a comical one – as was the case with an exposure when an angel’s halo slowly slipped during the long exposure and the model could not move to stop it because she would spoil the pose. Cameron’s husband saw the whole event and could not stop laughing.
That these pictures create their own complex mystique beyond the prosaic or farcical circumstances of how they were created is part of their artistic integrity and power
Cameron’s photographs speak about the relationship between photography and other artistic media. These are relationships that are well understood now but were not so in Cameron’s day. She herself suggested hitherto unimagined possibilities for the relationship between art and photography. In the 21st century we have no doubt that photography is recognised as an art medium. We are also familiar with how photography challenged the conventional vision of representation: bringing in strange angles, truncated perspective, sharp closures of the borders of composition, arrested movement – the pictorial innovations that we associate with the mid-nineteenth century French avant garde and the Impressionist movement. In some ways, Cameron worked the other way. Her contemporaries regarded photography as a technical and documentary medium that would make the pencil and paintbrush superannuated. Indeed artists began to question the acceptable modes of representation in the light of what the camera demonstrated about visual perception. Cameron worked in the opposite direction to bring a pictorial and romanticized vision to the camera which was regarded as an impersonal and scientific tool
She was one of the first photographers to unlock the expressionist and emotional possibilities of the camera. We are now very familiar with photography as a medium for manipulating and exploiting emotional and personal content – so one must reiterate that Cameron’s effect was quite beyond the run of the mill photographs of her contemporaries. Cameron used the techniques and approaches that were regarded as artists’ prerogatives and employed them as a photographer. She used a grand abstracting vision, a pictorial rather than a documentary approach
Although some of her work is sentimental, it is far more abstract than many Victorian photographers. In her figure studies she pared down the fanciful tromp de l'oeil backgrounds and the masses of accessories that many of her contemporaries used. She suppressed readable detail in favour of a soft focus approach which permitted a greater range of lighting effects. In some works she is almost formalist where she stresses such issues as alight and shade, different textures and the velvety blacks that her medium permitted. She was clearly art historically conscious and her lighting effects resembles those associated with artists such as Rembrandt who was beginning to be discovered by the Victorians as an artist of “genius”.
Cameron’s photographs are not simply Victorian images, but they can form the basis of questioning the issue of representation – of the relationship between artist and sitter, viewer and artist, viewer and sitter; between reality, representation and performance. These issues have concerned many later photographers such as American photographer Cindy Sherman who uses poses, costumes and accessories to evoke such diverse entities as a Hollywood film and old master painting. Australian artist Tracey Moffatt and Japanese artist Morimura also add a racial and gender component into their photographs. Morimura as a Japanese male dresses up as familiar Western female icons. Pierre et Gilles celebrated the transformative magic of; dressing up, the fun and kitsch of tableaux, the gap between the reality of the sitter and the escapist myth of the story that they are meant to represent. Whilst the slippage that Cameron creates may have been more unconscious than Pierre et Gilles, she is already aware of the fantasy and performative aspects of photography to which these later artists make such clear reference. One could even evoke more edgy photographers of staged drama within the photographic plane such as Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe in his flower pictures certainly seems as strongly motivated as Cameron in using the camera as a tool for the pursuit of an expression of “beauty”.
Cameron’s work also raises fascinating questions about the representation of women, and the image of women in the visual arts. We are saturated with images of women in the media. Glamour and beauty are used to sell products or promote entertainment events. Cameron’s photographs are like paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite movement – an early source for this intense media scrutiny of the female image. This scrutiny is proscriptive, imposing a limited image upon women, but also celebratory in that they make the female image the centre of an intense focus, a gaze that is both worshipping and fetishising. Annals of My Glasshouse presented the viewer with the foundations of this universal media fixation with idealised, airbrushed and stylised womanhood. Cameron’s works are early steps upon a road that would lead to such destinations as Hollywood, the modern fashion magazine with its directional and explicatory shots and the sophistication and assurance of female imagery employed in advertising and commercial media.
Another important and very current issue is the role of women and beauty in these photographs. There is the intense focus upon the beautiful woman as central to an aesthetic experience, central to an understanding of what is “beautiful”. Like Rossetti, her images of women are frequently not about anything in particular, even when there is a subject and character named in the title. These pictures become statements about moods and feelings as much as anything. Such works are precursors of the symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century. She even evokes the physical format of Rossetti’s picture; the intense focus lies upon the oval face, the large eyes and the head thrown back ecstatically to show an extended white neck. The fascination with hair, the aloof, otherworldly gaze giving the sense of separation from life and suspended animation. Linda Nochlin has demonstrated that much of this Rossetti aesthetic survived into the convention of glamorous fashion illustration. These physical traits were those of Cameron’s sisters who were renowned as ‘beauties.’ She also photographed other known beauties of her era. Marie Spartali was a very talented artist in her own right and was also painted by other artists including Burne Jones and Rossetti. Alice Liddell was also a favoured model for Lewis Carroll and of course the girl to whom the Alice books were first recounted. May Prinsep was another well-known beauty who sat for many artists in her era.
Cameron’s images of beautiful women tell a number of stories. The May Queen, 1875 could be regarded as a fairly mainstream celebration of female beauty. Note the manner in which the gestures and expression are focused on a spirit of idealism. Mountain Nymph – Sweet Liberty, 1866 is more surprising as it focuses upon the feminine in a more direct and confronting manner than the usual self effacing Victorian image of a woman. The title gives us a hint that Cameron is thinking of a naturalistic vision – the nymph as unfettered close to nature. The mountains suggests primitivism and freedom, as does the word liberty which puts us in a political structure. The unbound hair also demonstrates how Cameron’s photographs of women whom she knew were sometimes unconventional visions – she bypassed the dress and respectability codes of the era. It suggested how she could push her vision over the conventional code of behavior for women. Some of her models were lower class servants and lower residents over whom she could assume some authority, but many of her female sitters were equally respectable as her. Again we note how these photographs articulate issues that are still of artistic and social concern today; the border of private and public for women.
There is a distinct strain of feminism running through Cameron’s work. The Princess illustrates a poem by Tennyson in which he outlines a woman’s academia. Hypatia 1868 represents a historical figure, a world famous mathematician who counted amongst one of the most important scientists and philosophers of ancient times. She was eventuality torn to pieces by a group of Christian monks This was a story that fascinated the Victorians and Charles Kingsley wrote a best selling novel about this historical incident which showed the Christian Church in an unfavorable light. The narrative of Hypatia showed woman as being an intellectual leader, a position that was unusual in the Victorian era. It also demonstrated that women were punished if they transgressed into the public space.
A number of Cameron’s female characters had troubled lives. Sappho was a great Greek poetess who finally committed suicide. Beatrice Cenci was a woman of the renaissance who murdered her sexual abuser. Were these photographs a way for Cameron to push the boundaries of female identity, both negative and positive??
Cameron did not see herself as a victim but fascinated with greatness and eminence, beauty, intellect and artistic skills. Her male sitters are like her female sitters paradigms. They are not only portraits but also exploration of ideas about a topic. These photographs are, I think, a type of exegesis. They are documents of who were famous in this era. The famous, cultural heroes at this era were “great” scientists: Herschel the astronomer, Professor Jowett, visual artists or musicians like Joachim – who was internationally famous, as well as visual artists. Cameron’s portraits demonstrated Victorian conventions of what a “great” man would look like; the lined face and the thinker holding a book. Just as we see on TV, academics are usually filmed in an office with wild hair like Beethoven, again the reference to the Rembrandt self-portraits. Her photographs show a focus upon the face of the “genius”, itself a sign or a trope. She rearranged her sitters to make them appear like her imagined genius and forced her male sitters to appear with unkempt wild hair and disordered clothes, to suggest the genius. Cameron was a sort of hero –worshipper and she valued her contacts with the great figures of her era – facilitated by her upper social status.
"The Return after Three
Days"
Julia Margaret Cameron c.1865
Albumen silver photograph
Wilson Centre for Photography
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