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Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius. National Portrait Gallery, 2003.
When Julia Margaret Cameron's daughter made her a present of a camera, one hundred and forty years ago, photography was still in its infancy. It involved arduous work with chemicals for the artist, and long periods of stillness for the sitter. Cameron's passion overcame these obstacles, and the result was a series of highly original portraits and 'fancy' pictures. Cameron photographed many celebrities, especially in the world of the arts, she reinterpreted the style and subject matter of the old masters, creating narrative themes drawn from the Bible and her favourite authors.
It was appropriate that the National Portrait Gallery should house this splendid exhibition under the curatorship of Colin Ford. In 1974 the gallery launched a successful campaign to keep in Britain an album presented by Cameron to her close friend and fellow photographer, the astronomer, Sir John Herschel. The Herschel album contained seven portraits of Tennyson. A number of these were displayed in the exhibition, including one brooding image of the poet, with his flat hat tilted sideways. Cameron specialised in such close ups of the heads of the great men of the age, and Tennyson, her neighbour in the Isle of Wight, was a favourite sitter. In all, seventeen portraits of Tennyson by Cameron survive, two further examples showing him with his sons. The best known of her images of the poet, 'the dirty monk',...