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

An Early Daguerreotype Portrait Studio (1842)

An early daguerreotype studio, as depicted in a woodcut by George Cruikshank in 1842. This illustration shows the interior of Richard Beard's daguerreotype portrait studio at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London's Regent Street, the first professional photographic portrait studio in England, which opened in 1841. In this early period, Beard employed Wolcott's Mirror Camera, which used a concave mirror instead of a lens.

 a. A daguerreotype studio was often situated at the very top of a building, which had a glass roof to let in as much light as possible. 

b.The subject sat on a posing chair placed on a raised platform, which could be rotated to face the light. The sitter's head is held still by a clamp.

The stages of making a daguerreotype portrait

1. An assistant polishes a silver-coated copper plate with a long buffer until the surface is highly reflective (y). c.The highly polished plate is then taken into the darkroom, where it is sensitized with chemicals ( e.g. chloride of iodine, chloride of bromine ).

2.The operator places the sensitized plate into a camera placed on a high shelf (z). When the sitter is ready the operator removes  the camera cover and times the required exposure with a watch. [ In this illustration, the operator is using Wolcott's Mirror Camera, which was fitted with a curved mirror instead of a lens ].

3. The exposed plate is returned to the darkroom where the photographic image on the silvered plate is "brought out" with the fumes from heated mercury (d). The photographic image is "fixed" by bathing the plate in hyposulphate of soda. The photographic plate with the daguerreotype image is then washed in distilled water (e)and dried.

4. Finally, the finished daguerreotype portrait is covered by a sheet of protective glass and is either mounted in a decorative frame or presented in a leather-bound case and offered to the customer for close inspection. Early daguerreotype portraits were very small and to appreciate the fine detail these customers are using a magnifying glass.

Daguerreotype Exposure Times1839  Daguerreotype 

half-plate & whole plate    15-30 minutes1841  Daguerreotype ninth-plate & sixth- plate    20 sec - 90 seconds1842  Daguerreotype ninth-plate & sixth- plate    10 sec - 60 seconds

The Brothers Quay

    The extraordinary Quay Brothers are two of the world’s most original filmmakers. Identical twins who were born in Pennsylvania in 1947, Stephen and Timothy Quay studied illustration in Philadelphia before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, where they started to 1970s.

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.

In the garden of Dante Gabriel

!click the title!


During the summer of 1865, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti invite the photographer John Robert Parsons 1862-1909 in his London home in Cheyne Walk to make a memorable series of pictures of his favorite model, Jane, wife of William Morris, whose strange beauty it was obvious to eight years earlier when the eighteen-senior years, the groom's daughter stood on the spot where he executed frescoes for the Oxford Union Society.

While the photographer performed the technical part of the shooting, he asks each portraying gestures, looks, backgrounds, hair, jewelry, costume-a blue silk dress without a corset, typical of the Aesthetic fashion, crafted by Jane herself well - everything was carefully composed with the active collaboration of the model for future paintings.

Albumen print from a collodion-on-glass-negative

Gala Nocturna takes place in truly unique location, a little Neo-Gothic Church! of Altena

ANNIE BERTRAM  I LOVE