Idylls of the King, en plein air

One of the early pioneers of photographic portraiture, Julia Margaret Cameron began her career at the age of 48.

 “From the first moment, I handled my lens with a tender ardor," she wrote, "and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor." Cameron trained herself to master the laborious steps of producing negatives with wet collodion on glass plates, favoring slight blurs in her images and looser compositions than the polished portraits of her colleagues. She moved in the high intellectual circles of Victorian England, capturing leading academics and artists such as Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin. Many critics praised her originality, though others derided her for slovenly technique. Drawing inspiration from historical and contemporary writers and painters,

 Cameron also staged scenes from history or literature, such as her photographic illustrations of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and regularly enlisted family members, friends, and domestic servants as models for Madonnas, 

Christ figures, and angels.

Julia Margaret Cameron
DIMBOLA MUSEUM & GALLERIES
Terrace Lane (off Gate Lane)
Freshwater Bay
Isle of Wight PO40 9QE

Summer Days, 1866
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative
13 ^7/8 × 11 ^1/8 in
35.2 × 28.3 cm

The Sunflower, 1866-1870

Albumen print

13 ^7/8 × 9 ^9/16 in

35.2 × 24.3 cm

Consuming Nonsense: Freshwater Circle Society Study Day

SATURDAY 4TH JUNE, 10.30AM - 3.00PM

Mad Tea Party

LEWIS CARROLL, PEN–NAME OF CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON

Carroll referred to photography as devotion, entertainment, fascination, practice, chief interest, and his "one amusement." His long career as a photographer (1856-1880) coincides with the "Golden Era" of nineteenth-century photography, which centered on the wet collodion negative process and the corresponding positive albumen print process.
These processes were complex and required considerable technical expertise, practice, patience and experience to master. The photographer was required to set up his camera and tripod and pose his subject. The next step involved coating and sensitizing a plate of glass in the darkroom (or, if in the field, in a portable darkroom tent), transporting the "wet plate" to the camera, and almost immediately making an exposure upon it. Finally, the plate was returned to the darkroom for rapid developing and fixing before it could dry.
Carroll favored the albumen print almost exclusively, like most photographers of his day. Utilizing a binding solution of processed egg whites to hold light-sensitive silver salts onto the coated surface of a thin sheet of paper, the albumen process allowed the wet collodion negatives, once they had been fixed and dried, to be placed in contact with the sensitized paper surface and printed. The resulting prints typically had a lustrous surface and a broad tonal range. Carroll’s surviving glass negatives and paper prints within the Ransom Center collections display a mastery of the technique which only a devoted practitioner could accomplish. They were the product of his own special looking-glass: the camera.


ALICE LIDDELL or Alice in Wonderland "muse"
Born 4 May 1852 Westminster London
died 16 November 1934 Kent UK

The first, taken in 1859 by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) shows 7 year-old Alice posed as a beggar girl.
The last, taken by the famous Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer shows Alice as a young woman–posed as the mirror image of Carroll’s beggar girl.