Julia Margaret Cameron (English b. Calcutta, 1815-1879)
Thomas Carlyle, 1867
Albumen print
Gift of Winston and Jeffrey Adler Collection of 19th Century Photography
1976.53
This portrait of Thomas Carlyle exemplifies pictorialism, a style of art photography pioneered in part by one of the most prominent woman photographers in history: Julia Margaret Cameron. Cameron’s style is characterized by her rejection of the very qualities which promoted photography as painting’s mechanical, candid foil, in favor of the atmosphere, strokes, and imperfections of the ancient medium. Elongated exposures burned dynamic streaks of light into her negatives like painterly brush strokes while loose lenses yielded perfectly unfocused images reminiscent of Romantic paintings. Cameron embraced these photographic imperfections as expressive and intentional manipulations, linking the people she photographed to biblical and classical allegories, mythologies, and archetypes.
Cameron celebrated the inner heroism of her sitters with the pictorialist approach. Having spent the majority of her life in British India, Cameron was a vocal supporter of colonialism in the West Indies and beyond. This portrait depicts Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, a fellow advocate of imperialism. Cameron admired Carlyle’s intellectual prowess, demonstrated through his writings, including those which justified colonial practices. She sought to represent him radiating a mystical, enlightened aura. By visually likening Carlyle to an ancient sage, Cameron legitimized and exalted his imperialist views. This painterly, romantic portrait illustrates Cameron’s mixed legacy as both a brilliant forerunner of photography as an art form, and as an historical figure inextricably tied to Britain’s insidious history of imperial conquest.
Andrew Handrea, Loeb Curatorial Research Intern, Summer 2020
Further Reading:
- Annette Kicken and Rudolf Kicken, Pictorialism: Hidden Modernism: Photography 1896-1916 (Vienna: Georg Kargl Fine Arts; Berlin: Galerie Kicken, 2008).
- Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949 [1937]), 119–38.
- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, and Kate Flint, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (2013)
- Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’ (Manchester University Press, 2016).
- Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Getty Publications, 2003).
- Sophie Gordon, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Roger Fenton, Julia Mararet Cameron (Royal Collection Publications, 2010).
- Thomas Padon, ed., Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery; Douglas & McIntyre, 2008).
- In the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1392440/thomas-carlyle-photograph-cameron-julia-margaret/
- In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/camr/hd_camr.htm
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