THE BLACK AND WHITE MOODS OF CAMERON

In Werner Herzog’s film “Kaspar Hauser,” a youth is found in the square of a 19th-Century German town. He has spent his entire life imprisoned in a dark room with no human contact. He can barely speak and hardly stand. Although 18 years old, he is like an infant. The town, perforce, takes him in. Everybody from the peasants to the kindly philanthropist who finally takes him in treats him well according to the rational and moral lights of 19th-Century intellectual enlightenment. But they keep getting him wrong, and the film becomes a metaphor of the struggle between civilized knowledge and primitive insight.

The photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron come from England in the same period, and one not uninfluenced by German Romanticism. They seem to embody the same muffled battle between Appolonian light and Dionysian darkness going on inside the same person.

On the face of it they seem very civilized, but just underneath they have a compelling oddness, like the exotic fruits of overgrown gardens or cats with one blue eye and one yellow one.

Cameron was the wife of a proper British civil servant and the mother of six. In 1863, after the family returned from service in Ceylon, she took up photography at age 48.

The energetic woman marched bravely into the awkward intricacies of the photography of the day with its cumbersome cameras, glass plates and tricky developing processes. She pressed everyone in sight to serve as models. Household maids were transformed into Madonnas, young children became cherubs and illustrious male friends of the family served both as themselves and as heroic prototypes. Thomas Carlyle’s portrait distills his image into that of the heroes he extolled in literature. Robert Browning looks like a wise Roman senator-philosopher. Painter William Holman Hunt becomes the creative dervish. Alfred Tennyson is as intense as a Disciple of the Lord, and Longfellow looks ferocious. (Evidently because he hated having his picture taken.)

Well, it all sounds like a jolly good pastime for a comfortable matron of a certain age. Nice hobby. Capture the noble religious sentiments expressed in amateur theatricals. Make flattering photographic homage to the texts of renowned friends. Pick up some of the style of our acquaintances among the Pre-Raphaelite painters, echo the nobility of the recently revived Italian Renaissance and express the high-minded liberalism of Britain’s fine reformist spirit in staged flower-girl pictures that predate Lisa Doolittle. Give mother something to do.

And what is in it for us, the audience, some 125 years later? Sounds like an invitation to a campy chuckle over some sentimental old stuff and a chance to see some images of the celebrities of yesteryear.

If that seems sufficient reason to go to a photo show, Los Angeles currently has not just one but three opportunities for a rare look at the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, and not just incidently, to see the first exhibition organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum’s photo department and its curator, Weston J. Naef. It is being staged in cooperation with Loyola Marymount University and UCLA and it presents holdings from the Getty’s research library organized by curator Cynthia Burlingham.

The well-organized viewer will probably want to go first to LMU whose curator Ellen Ekedal has installed the group of Cameron’s works known as the Overstone Album, which is the hub of the exhibition and on view to Oct. 25. It is the focus of the catalogue the Getty issued for the occasion. Titled “Whisper of the Muse,” the book is exceptionally beautiful in production and contains a literate and illuminating essay by Mike Weaver. This album shows Cameron’s earliest work and gives us the artist warts and all, with awkward prints and models whose minds are clearly on something other than the poetic thoughts they are supposed to be thinking. The selection at the Getty (to Nov. 6) and UCLA’s Grunwald Gallery (opening Monday to Nov. 2) represents a Cameron more mature and in control of her means.

One look at any of them, however, is enough to force curiosity or campiness into a poor second place. Both the facts and the expression broadcast from these works immediately obliterate the notion of Cameron as a comfortable amateur. For one thing, the Overstone Album was presented to Lord Overstone--a major collector of Old Master art--in gratitude for past and future patronage, which Julia Margaret sorely needed.

According to Weaver’s essay, Mr. Cameron had retired from the Indian service having failed to make his fortune. Renowned friends notwithstanding, the Camerons were severely down on their luck. Julia very likely hoped to make money by her photography, but evidently about all she got were complaints from the family. Too much money spent on photo equipment and chemicals.

So, rather than elaborate hobby photography we have the fruits borne of a family in decline. Maybe that is what lends these pictures their air of melancholy. They are like lilies turning brown in the sun.

Melancholy and tremulous. There is something fragile in all of Cameron’s women, something wounded and irredeemably troubled. Cameron cleaved to a kind of feminism that believed women to be, “Great thro’ love” (while men were great “thro’ genius”). Given that Cameron’s art participated in the 19th-Century fascination with typology, there is nothing stereotypical about her women, who range from empathic Madonna types to Venus-Magdalen visions of carnal beauty to embodiments of independence with rose-petal lips and sharp little jaws who look like Shakesperian heroines in boys’ clothes.

But all seem enveloped in a memory of terrible trauma from which they will never recover. All participate in Cameron’s fascination with the legend of Beatrice Cenci, who conspired with her brothers to kill her father, whom she accused of incest.

From the center of her work and family connections Cameron reaches forward to Virginia Woolf and back to Lewis Carroll. Alice Liddell, who inspired Charles Dodgson to write “Alice in Wonderland,” posed for Cameron as a young woman, and Cameron’s own photographs of children have the same weird sexual charge as Dodgson’s. Cameron’s children are hauntingly erotic and seem to exist--visibly--as their adult selves in embryo. The sensibility of Cameron’s era seemed to consciously recognize children as innocent and spontaneous in their carnal lives and subconsciously as riveting succubi who live in a realm now forbidden to adults.

In our secular and psychological time, these photographs must come across very differently than in the minds of contemporaries for whom they were swathed in veils of literary allusion and religious metaphor.

In another way they seem near-neighbors. Nearly everybody who sees them is reminded of Flower Children hippies of the ‘60s costumed in thrift-shop velvet setting off for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in dusty Agoura, girls haloed in waist-long frizzy Pre-Raphaelite locks, boys in patriarch beards, everybody living out their Jungian fantasies.

Julia Margaret Cameron is an important historical figure, a pioneer in soft-focus photography. In her more finished works at the Getty and UCLA it is clear she became a riveting portraitist and a manipulator of light so deft some work actually has the sculptural qualities of Renaissance art--often bringing Della Robbia reliefs to mind.

That is important but less so than the works’ eloquent and troubled expression of the psyche of people of high principle and aspiration so sensitive that nothing escaped them except objectivity. There is nothing here of the cool of Manet, so in the end we have to appreciate the work with the given that it wallows a bit in its own bog.