Described by Roland Barthes as one of the great “originators” of photography, Julia Margaret Cameron was a creature like no other. She picked up her first camera in 1863, when she was 48. A gift from her daughter, the camera was delivered with a note that now reads like an award-winning example of British understatement: “It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.” In that seaside village, on England’s Isle of Wight, she made almost 1,000 images that to this day look like no one else’s. “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron” opens at the Jeu de Paume on October 10, the first Paris exhibition of the artist since 1985. It will be fascinating to see how this new interest in Cameron expresses itself in the creative Zeitgeist of the fashion capital.
Cameron was born in Calcutta, India, in 1815, one of the seven famous Pattle sisters, all of whom were educated in France. She was known to have an eccentric nature but also a generosity of spirit. As a young bride in Calcutta, acting as a hostess for the governor general, Sir Henry Hardinge, Cameron led European society. On her return to England with her husband and children, she threw herself into London’s artistic circles. It wasn’t until Freshwater, at the foot of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s garden, in a house the Camerons formed out of two fishermen’s cottages and named “Dimbola,” that her passion finally found its medium. From a standing start in a renovated chicken coop, and working with glass negatives, Cameron began her remarkable photographic practice.
