A gifted eye for close-ups

How fitting that the highly theatrical practice of photographer Julia Margaret Cameron should itself make its way into a piece of theater. The short play, “Freshwater,” named after the Isle of Wight home where Cameron did most of her work, was written in 1923 by Virginia Woolf, Cameron’s great-niece.

Woolf never knew Cameron directly, because she was born a few years after the photographer’s death in 1879, but she did her homework. The piece is both knowing and affectionate. It’s also delightfully irreverent. In honor of her great-aunt’s heritage, and the ultra-serious tone of Cameron’s enterprise, Woolf wrote a farce.

Cameron, born in British India in 1815 and married to a highly regarded colonial administrator, didn’t start photographing until 1864. Her nest had emptied and her husband was often away tending his coffee plantations in Ceylon. For Christmas, her grown daughter gave her a camera to help fill the void. She photographed for a scant dozen years, but as her richly rewarding retrospective at the J. Paul Getty Museum reveals, even if she had set down her camera after a year or two, her place in photographic history would have been secure.

Nearly instantly upon exploring her new medium, Cameron made radically inventive and profoundly beautiful images. And in those first few years, she made significant work in all the areas that would collectively constitute her oeuvre -- portraiture, religious tableaux and scenes inspired by literature.

Cameron’s breakthroughs came quickly, perhaps, because she arrived at the medium intellectually and aesthetically mature, steeped in current developments in science, art and literature. When the Camerons moved from India to England in 1848, they became neighbors and close friends with the author Sir Henry Taylor. They were regulars at the salon that formed at the home of Cameron’s sister on the outskirts of London. Little Holland House has been referred to, in retrospect, as a precursor to the gatherings of the Bloomsbury circle, for it attracted a stellar cast of writers, artists, musicians and politicians.

Later, England’s cultural epicenter shifted to Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight off the country’s southern coast, where Alfred, Lord Tennyson had set up house -- and in 1860, the Camerons adjoining. A parade of talent passed through Freshwater -- Charles Darwin, Henry Longfellow, Anthony Trollope, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and many more. Cameron served, in part, as its social director, staging four-hour dinners and even building a small theater beside her house for the informal production of plays. When she received the gift of a camera, she turned it upon the life around her, her family and friends, household help, and visitors to the island, matching the vibrancy of the environment with her own blend of sophistication, eccentricity and determination.

She was never seduced by the medium’s capacity to record detail. She scoffed at the output of London’s professional portraitists, dismissing their information-packed images as “mere topographic photography.”

Her stirring close-ups -- regarded as the first in photographic history -- have an intensity few portraits have mustered, before or since.

A pair of portraits of the author Thomas Carlyle from 1867 possesses a high-voltage intensity. Cameron eliminated the conventional portrait’s clutter of detail identifying stature or profession to zero in on the fundamental tools of genius, the head and hands. Her images of accomplished older men, particularly, do not flatter in physical terms. The sculptural use of raking light and the extremely close view highlight wrinkles and bags under the eyes. But the pictures monumentalize these men as intellectuals.

The immediacy of their presence in these images is all the more unlikely considering the lengthy exposures required at the time, which made holding poses an arduous task. The blur that characterizes many of Cameron’s most stunning pictures has long been a source of controversy among scholars and critics. Many have regarded it as a fluke or the consequence of a casual understanding of the medium’s technical challenges.

Cameron, however, behaved casually about nothing, least of all her photography. She was exacting in her efforts, and if the pictures were loosely focused, the focal length of her lens and the possibly compromised condition of her own eyesight might have had something to do with it, but it was primarily a matter of aesthetic intent. Colin Ford, who organized the exhibition for the National Portrait Gallery in London and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England (the show’s only other venues), makes this argument convincingly in the fine book accompanying the show.

Cameron drew from the long history of art for her inspiration more than from the short history of photography (the medium was just 25 years old when she began working). Her portraits hark back to the shadowy grandeur of Rembrandt and resonate as well with contemporaneous tonal studies being made by Whistler. She was a proto-Pictorialist, foreshadowing the turn-of-the-century movement that promoted photography’s affinity with other visual art forms.

She counted the pre-Raphaelite painter G.F. Watts as her primary aesthetic mentor. Several of her pictures derive directly from specific paintings of his. Others, notably her staged religious scenes, with neighborhood children cast as angels and her housemaid as the Madonna, echo Renaissance compositions by Raphael and Perugino. For these, and for a wealth of pictures inspired by the poetry of Tennyson and others, Cameron enlisted the not-always-eager cooperation of those around her. Reminiscences abound of being coerced, cajoled or bribed into trading the day’s sunshine for her studio’s moody darkness.

The Getty show features about 100 photographs, Cameron’s greatest hits and more, including rarely seen ethnographically oriented pictures she made in her last few years, after she and her husband settled in Ceylon. The show affirms Cameron’s audacious brilliance, as a woman operating among a cultural elite of men, within a family of limited and sometimes distressed financial resources.

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Julia Margaret Cameron, Photographer

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.

Ends: Jan. 11

Price: Free, but parking $5

Contact: (310) 440-7300