Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 Calcutta – 26 January 1879 Kalutara, Ceylon) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes. Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Her style was not widely appreciated in her own day: her choice to use a soft focus and to treat photography as an art as well as a science, by manipulating the wet collodion process, caused her works to be viewed as "slovenly", "mistakes" and bad photography. She found more acceptance among pre-Raphaelite artists than among photographers. Her work has influenced modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight is open to the public.

ID: 230120

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As the daughter of an official of the East India Company, Cameron spent a number of years in Calcutta, but was educated in England in France. She married Charles Hay Cameron in 1838 and brought up six children. She was given her first camera in 1864 to keep her occupied while her husband and sons tended to the family coffee plantation in Ceylon. She mastered the difficult wet collodion negative and albumen print process, and was later elected as a member to the photographic societies of London and Scotland in 1864. Cameron regarded the recent technical advancements of photography as an intrusion between her and her subject. She often inscribed on her work "From Life," and refused to retouch defects on the negative. Her soft-focus technique gives her images a dream-like quality, often using dramatic and symbolic lighting. Her major work of narrative photography was her "Illustrations to Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King' and Other Poems" (London, 874-1875).

ID: 500118804

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