The red and the white roses are a simple metaphor of youthful beauty, briefly flowering in early summer and changed by biting frost or age. The photographer has filled the frame to overflowing giving the image a very direct quality, but by showing her subjects out of focus, she's made it very melancholy too. The two girls were Kate and Elizabeth Keown, the daughters of an artillery officer living near Cameron's house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815 - 1879)
Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most impressive photographers of the nineteenth century. Her photographs taken mainly in the 1860s consisted of religious, literary and allegorical tableaux and portraiture. She can be credited with the introduction of intense spiritual and moral concerns to photography. The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of her famous sitters. He commissioned a series of photographs to illustrate his 'Idylls of the King'. After Cameron's death, her pictures were published in the photographic journal 'Camera Work' and influenced and inspired the Pictorialists.
