When One Show Isn’t Enough

Julia Margaret Cameron was a privileged woman of Victorian England. Her social position gave her access to the academic, artistic and literary elite of the day. She bucked convention by becoming a pioneer professional photographer in the 1860s.

Presently her work is surveyed in unusual depth by simultaneous exhibitions at the Getty Museum and Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.

Shows with separate catalogs and a total of about 90 albumen prints add up to a large dose of information. The exhibitions tend to be as much a social document as an aesthetic one. Today the ensemble suggests stills from a “Masterpiece Theatre” miniseries about genteel family life in the fading glory days of Britain’s colonial empire.

Cameron was nearly 50 when she started taking pictures, around 1864. She brought a rich background to the enterprise.

The artist was born Julia Pattle in Calcutta in 1815. Her father was an official of the East India Co., her mother descended from French Royalists. Julia was the fourth of seven sisters who were considered beautiful, vivacious and a little eccentric. Julia got most of her education in France. There’s a lot of Jane Austen banging around in this script.

In 1835 she married Charles Hay Cameron, a distinguished liberal reformer who wrote a noted essay on the sublime and the beautiful. Cameron, old enough to be Julia’s father, was also a high official of colonial India’s bureaucracy.

Julia’s life seems in many ways an approving mirror image of her parents’. In 1848 her husband retired and the family immigrated to England, settling on the Isle of Wight. Their next-door neighbor was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. They became such good friends that she did his portrait and photographic illustrations for his “Idylls of the King.”

Another of her early subjects was Ellen Terry, already a well-known actress at age 16. The picture is called “Sadness” and was taken shortly after Terry’s marriage to the distinguished painter George Frederick Watts, also a much older man. The Cameron sisters engineered the marriage. It was as if Julia had found her alliance so agreeable that she wanted her young friend to enjoy a similar one. In this case, it didn’t work. Painter and thespian parted amicably a few years later.

Given the fascination of this story line, one is inclined to assume that the value of Cameron’s work lies there. She took her photography very seriously, mastered its then cumbersome, complicated and demanding techniques. She scotched any impression that she might be an amateur by entering international exhibitions, getting reviews, winning medals, copyrighting work and making money. She was impressively prolific in what turned out to be a rather short career.

After the Camerons moved to Ceylon in 1875, her work becomes sporadic and unfocused. Even at that, her surviving oeuvre includes more than 200 prints.

The question of her real artistic contribution remains. “My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art,” she wrote.

Photographs that seem to most closely echo her tone are sincere, melodramatic tableaux vivant, for which models posed as allegorical figures. Cameron, a devout Anglican, leaned to biblical themes.

Even fervent admirers admit this is her weakest work, stiff and artificial. Interestingly, although it does look quaint, it never seems campy or self-satirizing.

Even Cameron’s acknowledged masterpieces reflect the largely conventional attitudes expected of a proper Victorian gentlewoman. Subjects are essentially from the family-centered woman’s world. Winsome pictures of small children concentrate on the belief that childhood equated to purity. Thoughtfully rendered female subjects like Mrs. Herbert Duckworth or Mary Hillier always emphasize character, chastity and the bloom of youth. Victorians were a little hypocritical.

Male subjects like her scientist-mentor J.F.W. Herschel, painter Holman Hunt and writer Thomas Carlyle epitomize the dominant view of the male as hero. Cameron clearly sees mature men as paradigms of wisdom, talent and genius, and she photographed them with a respect bordering on awe. All the same, she never quite defers to them.

Cameron’s almost visceral sense of equality makes one realize that she is not basically about her picturesque historical bunting. She’s not about ideological pigeonholes. She achieved a universal artistic goal as rarely gained as it is long sought. She made art with actual presence. When you look at it, you momentarily believe you face the subject in person.

The sensation is so marked that any sense of rigid theme or stereotyping falls away. Her people become nuanced and complex. Her real genius is as simple and awesome as that.

The Getty’s “Julia Margaret Cameron: The Creative Process” was curated by the museum’s Julian Cox.

Curator Violet Hamilton organized the Scripps presentation, “Annals of My Glass House: Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.” After closing in Claremont, it will travel to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; through Jan. 5, parking reservations required, closed Mondays, (310) 458-2003. Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Ave., Claremont, through Dec. 15, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (909) 607-3397.