Rural photography; seductive advertising

I don't approve of the advertising industry at all. It knowingly encourages conspicuous consumption, poor dietary habits in primary school children, sexual stereotyping, waste of the world's limited resources (plastic, packaging) and pollution. I rarely watch television that has paid ads, and I never listen to radio that accepts paid advertisements - only the ABC, BBC etc.

Now I have to admit that somewhere, sometime, somehow the advertising industry will hit pay dirt i.e they will find an image/sound/smell/taste that appeals to even the least receptive person. For me, it is this magazine advertisement for Montana wine from New Zealand.

Montana wine advertisement in an Australian women's magazine, 2009 (cropped)

The image presents a simple table in the open country side, with the sun slipping behind the distant hills at dusk. No humans, no animals, no cars, no buildings and no food. But the promise is of glorious scenery, fresh air, twenty of your closest friends, great food and wine, pure colours and no worries about your boss, your mortgage or apologising to the children's high school teachers.

Of course I understand that food doesn't simply appear on a table in a country field - a team of people would have to buy it, cook it in a tent, serve it to the guests and then clean up after. Nonetheless as a piece of visual art, the photographic image is well crafted. As a piece of clever advertising, it is very seductive.

Urban photographic art of the 50s and 60s: Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic

Leonard Joel Auctioneers here in Melbourne are having their Annual Photographic Auction on Sunday 19th June 2011 at 2pm. I don’t normally get involved in promoting or advertising private companies, but the stars of the auction are “my” photographic artists.

Other bloggers will understand that I feel quite territorial about Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007) and Mark Strizic (b1928).  Sievers left Germany in 1938 and Strizic left Germany via Croatia in 1950 - and luckily for photography and for Australia, they both chose Melbourne as their home.

Mark Strizic, Under Matthew Flinders at St Pauls, 1954,

silver gelatin photograph, 22 x 15cm,

Leonard Joel auction.

Readers may remember The Paris End of Collins Street: Photography, Fashion and Glamour Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (2006). This exhibition showcased the work of some of Melbourne’s best-known photographers from the period up to the 1960s, including Athol Shmith, Jack Cato, Julian Smith, May and Mina Moore, Ruth Hollick, Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot and Wolfgang Sievers. All of them had established studios in the glamorous, Paris End at the top of Collins St.

Helmut Newton is well represented at the Leonard Joel auction, while Athol Shmith and Julian Smith are involved in just one auction lot each.

Emma Matthews, writer, curator and art historian, has worked with Melbourne photographer Mark Strizic over the past ten years. On Wednesday 15th June 2011, she will present a discussion on Strizic's images which documented Melbourne's citizens and cityscapes in the 1950s and 1960s. Emma Matthews wrote Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern, published in 2009.

From Germany to Australia: photographic art of the 1950s and 60s

The author Robert Deane refers to the years from 1938 till after WW2 as a period of foreign influences in Australian photography. As a young man, Deane didn’t know of non-British or non-Australian photographers in Australia, and was rather delighted to find an entire generation of beautifully trained artists on our shores. Sadly the efforts of Australian security and suspicion of enemy aliens had largely denied one immigrant photographer, Margaret Michaelis, the opportunity to work to her potential during the war. And three of her artist contemporaries had to serve their time in the Australian Army, labouring: Wolfgang Sievers and Henry Talbot in Employment Companies and Helmut Newton as a truck driver.

As this blog has shown before, several of Australia’s leading artists and art critics of the period were either virulently anti-Semitic or derisive of the new art forms being introduced by émigré artists. Nonetheless these emigres, largely German speaking, did eventually get into their proper careers.

I have analysed the contribution of Wolfgang Sievers in this blog in the past, but readers should also consider Athol Shmith, Helmut Newton and Heinz Tichauer/Henry Talbot. After the war, for example, Henry Talbot revived his passion for photography and in 1956, he set up a joint studio specialising in fashion and advertising in Melbourne with fellow Dunera internee Helmut Newton. Their joint contribution to the history of post-war photography in Australia was displayed in an enormous book of photographs from the 1950s-60s.

The Paris End of Collins Street: Photography, Fashion and Glamour Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (2006) showcased the work of some of Melbourne’s best-known photographers from the period up to the 1960s, including Athol Shmith, Jack Cato, Julian Smith, May and Mina Moore, Ruth Hollick, Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot and Wolfgang Sievers. All of them had established studios in the glamorous area at the top of Collins St, fondly called the Paris end.

Block Arcade Melbourne, 1960s, by Strizic

A few years ago, spouse and I were invited to visit the rural retreat of another very fine photographic artist, Mark Strizic. Mark gave a speech about what it was like being an artist after the war, who was doing good work and who was doing dodgy stuff, who was sleeping with whom etc. Then all the visitors moved into the studio where the tables were loaded up with photos, folders and documents, the massive papertrail of a long, creative life.

Strizic was born in Berlin in 1928, moved to Croatia during the war, and then finally moved to Melbourne in 1950. He became a labourer at Maribyrnong's Department of Works and Housing, then went to an office job at the railways. But even those dingy jobs were acceptable. I would imagine like many other Displaced Persons after the war, Strizic chose Melbourne to be as far away from the carnage of Europe as one could get, without falling off the globe. Fortunately Strizic had arrived in Australia more or less at the same time as these other art photographers, mainly German speaking as I noted. And in 1957 he felt he could take up photography as a career.

Arguably it was his new-comer status that allowed Strizic to photograph this booming city with fresh eyes. Boomerang Blog believed that as Strizic was the product of Europe, and viewed Australian life through post-war European eyes, his images did not celebrate our good fortune, but merely wondered at it. StevenClark also found the work of this immigrant photography to be incredibly interesting. He particularly loved the display “Melbourne: A City in Transition”.

Immigrants were very grateful for a secure, peaceful life and here was a grateful migrant with a good eye and a fine camera. I personally remember Melbourne in the early 1950s as a beautiful Victorian city, not yet destroyed by the developers’ bulldozers. Just as well Strizic captured those final years of Melbourne's architectural beauty and endless parkland. Young people today will have few other historical records of what Melbourne looked like, but for my generation it wasn’t history. It was our lives!

By the 1960s, the decision-makers wanted a smarter, taller, more modern Melbourne and “Whelan The Wrecker Was Here” signs started appearing on building sites (bomb sites?) everywhere. Even the very beautiful Paris End of Collins Street, Melbourne’s most prestigious address, was changing. And so were Melbourne's less than lovely back streets and inner-suburban slums.

In any case, Strizic had to move quickly. He photographed the destruction of buildings, before, during and after the wreckers were busy. Melbourne's architectural beauty, with its romantic European skyline of spires, cupolas and arches, was disappearing fast.

Modern domestic architecture, designed by Robin Boyd, by Strizic.

Strizic’s father had been an architect and Mark himself clearly had a lifelong interest in art and architecture. As well as the freelance photography of Melbourne’s architecture, Robin Boyd collaborated with Strizic on specific book called Living in Australia, in 1970. And in a special issue of the magazine Architecture in Australia commemorating Boyd in April 1973, Strizic did the photography.

Now a new book, by Emma Matthews, has emerged. Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern was published in 2009 by Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria. Matthews said of Strizic that he was astounded by a general disregard for aesthetics in what he thought was such an opulent country, so his work became a kind of visual essay. Too late of course, but at least the book documents what was lost of the grand, the Victorian, the Marvellous Melbourne years.

Capers Restaurant, 1960s, by Strizic

Perhaps his most intimate photos were those of people going about their daily business in town. In the 1960s a shopping trip to the city was rather special, and restaurateurs created elegant, stylish environments where ladies could lunch. The restaurateur Ross Shelmerdine commissioned architect Robin Boyd to redesign Capers Restaurant in 1960. The renovation was finished in 1962 and included a courtyard cafe with umbrellas and plants.

In 2007, the State Library of Victoria acquired Strizic's entire archive of about 5000 negatives, colour transparencies and slides. Last year, the library received a collection of Strizic's photographs donated through the Australian Government's cultural gifts programme.

Emma Matthews' new book on Mark Strizic and Melbourne

Read: Foreign Influences in Australian Photography 1930-80 by Robert Deane (on line).

An exhibition called Melbourne – A City in Transition was held at Gallery 101 in Melbourne in 2009. Art Blart reviewed that exhibition and included some amazing Strizic photographs in the blog.

Treasured photographs from World War One

Originally Australian soldiers could take their own photos during World War One, or they could use the services of British professionals. But for the last 1.5 years of the war, from July 1917, things changed.

Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins became the only two Australian professionals formally commissioned as war photographers in WW1. Along with five French professional photographers, Hurley and Hubert were pioneers in the creation of coloured war images. Coloured images were becoming possible in civilian life and these men wanted to reflect the battlefields and towns of the Western Front more accurately.

Hubert Wilkins. George Clemenceau visited the 4th Australian Division Headquarters at Bussy France, July 1918

Today the Australian War Memorial in Canberra has the total collection of commissioned Australian war photography from 1917 and 1918. The Canberra archive assembled a small selection of this major collection of photos in a booklet called Captured in Colour, edited by Nola Anderson and Ian Hodges.

The editors noted that while the colour plates could not be readily incorporated into printed formats, they could be used to present slide shows in public venues back in Australia while the war was still in progress. Hurley and Wilkins themselves wanted to create dramatic, staged shots or even trick photography, to enlist public support at home. I suppose they thought they could excite the public imagination for a war that was now dependent on conscription, despite conscription being opposed by half the adult population in Australia. Edwardian Promenade has confirmed the importance of magic lantern shows in bringing the news to cinemas everywhere.

Frank Hurley, Lighthorseman picking memorial flowers, Palestine, 1918

But who had thought of dramatic presentations in Australian scout halls and mechanics’ institutes as the goal for taking war photographs? Certainly not the important Australian war correspondent, Charles Bean. He planned to use the Hurley’s and Wilkin’s photographs as historical evidence, “a sacred record” of people and events. This record would allow the soldiers’ children and grandchildren to see what had happened in the 1914-8 era.. with plain, simple truth.

This divergence of goals created a problem. And in any case, what were they to photograph? Images of young Australian corpses would have been totally unacceptable politically and would have been devastating to the grieving parents and widows at home. Likewise, images of German teenage corpses would have left Australians with an image of their boys as callous beasts. So most of the photographs were of Australian soldiers and their allies at rest from the last battle, rehearsing for the next battle, mixing with local citizens in towns along the Western Front or architecture devastated by the two warring armies. 

Note that Hurley did take some images of active battle, including photos of corpses - in Behind the News blog. And in 2008 two of Hurley photographs, that depicted the horrors of trench warfare, were acquired by the NGV in August from a Sydney collector. But these photos were never intended to be used for public lectures.

Hurley was in Palestine in late 1917, taking amazing photographs of Australian cameliers, camel ambulances, Light horsemen, local citizens in cities and villages, and Jerusalem architecture. The capture of Jerusalem in Dec 1917 ended 400 years of Ottoman rule, and was cheered enthusiastically by all the Jewish citizens. Hurley did not record how the Arab citizens responded to the British success.

Frank Hurley, Australian Cameliers, Egypt, Feb 1918.

Hurley’s colour images greatly impressed an eager public in London in May 1918 when an exhibition of official war photographs was held at the Graftan Galleries.  So I can understand why Hurley resigned his commission in July 1918, very unhappy that the Grafton Galleries Exhibition was not to be sent directly to Australia.

Hubert Wilkins continued to document the AIF experience, even after the final shots of the war had been fired. In January 1919, Wilkins joined Charles Bean and his men on the Gallipoli Mission, retrospectively examining the ANZAC area and its famous 1915 campaign. As I have noted in a previous post, the painter George Lambert was the important partner with Wilkins as a documenter of the ANZAC campaign.

Hurley, Squadrons of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade in formation, Palestine, Feb 1918

ABlogAboutHistory refers readers to some very moving WW1 photos. The majority of these images are held by Gallica, the digital wing of the Bibliothèque National de France. Although the provenance of the photos is uncertain, it is thought they may be autochromes taken by the French photographer, Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud. History and traditions of England blog has amazing photos of show troops from America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and India in the UK, before leaving for the fighting front – mostly in France.

Monash University agreed that photographs are an inseparable part of our memory of war. They have come to play a vital role in our efforts to remember and to commemorate events of which we have no direct experience. Only people in their 60s now can remember what their grandfathers told them about The Great War. And while photos can’t bring home the terrible experience of war, they can provide us with images that at least indicate something of its horror. Monash's latest exhibition,  Icon & archive, drew on the collection of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The exhibition, which ran from April-July 2010, included many iconic photographs that have become lodged in Australia's national memory. And some that we could see for the first time.
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Monash University's exhibition literature had this sensitive studio portrait of an unnamed World War One soldier, complete with greatcoat, slouch hat and Australian army insignia. But who was he and what happened to him? 

And now a completely different collection of WW1 photographs. The Bendigo RSL Military Museum and Eaglehawk Heritage Society in central Victoria mounted an amazing exhibition of WW1 photos called A Camera on the Somme in 2009. From the Bendigo Art Gallery, the exhibition went on tour around Australian galleries during 2010 and is still travelling in 2011.

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Where did the Bendigo photos come from? Two young brothers from central Victoria, Jack and Bert Grinton, found themselves serving in the trenches of France and Belgium. 90 years later, an extraordinary find came to light. Inside a biscuit tin stored for decades in a shed on the Grinton farm – and headed for the rubbish tip – was a large collection of negatives and photographs; images taken by Jack and Bert Grinton between 1916 and 1919 with the cameras they carried with them during the war.

Grinton, Australian soldiers and French children, 1918, Bendigo RSL Military Museum

This collection is a unique addition to the historical record, for two reasons. Firstly it captured people and places often overlooked by official war photographs. Secondly it highlighted the development and artistry of amateur photography.

Alfred Gregory: 1950s and 1960s photography

Alfred Gregory was born in 1913. His father, a Lancashire grocer, was killed in the 1914-18 War when Alfred was just a toddler. His mother moved to Blackpool where she struggled to support her family during the post-war era and during the Great Depression, and he attended the local grammar school. At first young Alfred became a printer.

As soon as he was demobilised after WW2,  Gregory created a travel agency called Alfred Gregory Holidays, personally leading clients each year on treks through Nepal and other challenging mountain-climbing sites. Always Blackpool-based, it was only later that Alfred Gregory became a professional photographer.

Alfred Gregory, Photography from Everest to Africa, Penguin, 2007

Already an enthusiastic mountaineer and photographer, Gregory went with Sir Edmund Hillary to climb Mr Everest. Gregory’s pictures had some trouble in getting off the mountain, so he packed his undeveloped rolls of film into a canvas bag, sealed the bag and gave it to a runner. Talking about his famous image of Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing on their way to the summit, Gregory hoped the photos would reach Kathmandu and then London. They did! In only seven days! News of the British-led conquest of Mt Everest broke in London on the very day of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation on June 1953 and the heroic images were soon syndicated around the world.

Gregory assembled a fine collection of photographs used to illustrate the many books that would eventually be published about the Everest expedition. They appeared in a commemorative volume of their own, Alfred Gregory's Everest, 40 years later.

from Blackpool: A Celebration of the Sixties, Constable, 1993

In Blackpool in the early 1960s, Gregory used his photographic talents and sharp eye to create hundreds of images of the resort – beehive hairdos on the girls and brylcreemed hair on the boys. “The printing was impeccable, the composition classically balanced, and the observation as sharp and kindly as that of any of the great photographic masters”. But what matters most to me personally is that this was MY ERA! Fortunately his pictures eventually appeared in book form as Alfred Gregory's Blackpool 1993, a companion volume to Alfred Gregory's Everest.

Gregory took photographs in many countries of the world but his publications and his exhibitions seem to focus on Mt Everest and Blackpool. For Mr Everest his selection as team photographer was a last-minute surprise. But for Blackpool, Gregory did all the selecting himself.  So I wonder if he focused on these two places as the opposite extremes of human endeavour: the eternally pristine wilderness and romantic danger of impossibly high mountains Vs the sweaty crowds of a 1960s beach resort.

Alf Gregory and his Australian (second) wife emigrated to Australia in 1996 and settled in Melbourne. Gregory must have understood that time was running out for him because in 2007 a stunning book containing more than one hundred remarkable images from his career was published. It was called Alfred Gregory: Photography From Everest to Africa. Although to some extent the images explain themselves, I would prefer more than brief captions - I want wads of explanatory text.

Gregory died in February 2010. “From Everest to Blackpool”, which is running throughout October 2010, is “an exhibition that captures those short-lived moments when ordinary people, objects and places become extraordinary”. Source Photographica Brighton is hosting the exhibition in Melbourne.

Che Guevara and the suffering Christ

Ernesto "Che" Guevara 1928 – 1967 was the revolutionary hero of my generation. Born and educated in Argentina, this physician, author, military leader and diplomat became the major intellectual of the Cuban Revolution. And after the Cuban Revolution in 1958-9, Guevara played a number of critical roles in the new government of Fidel Castro.

Alborta's post mortem photo of Guevara, 1967

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It was inevitable that right wing leaders throughout South America would seek Guevara wherever he went, presumably to kill him once and for all. The end came when Guevara's plan for fomenting revolution in Bolivia failed in 1967. A Cuban exile, working as a CIA Special Activities Division operative, advised Bolivian troops during the hunt for Guevara in October of that year. Bolivian President René Barrientos immediately ordered that Guevara be executed, but that his orders had to be denied.

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It is probable that Che would have been compared to Christ being taken down from the cross in any case. He was in his 30s when he died, he had long hair and a beard, and he gave his life for the cause of the working class and the peasants in a deeply Catholic country. And probably his image would only grown in its inspiration – that change would arrive in Bolivia and that the poor could eventually live in dignity.
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But a  photograph emerged that seemed to me to be a powerful visual and artistic reminder of Che’s redemptive powers.  After his execution, Guevara's body was lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande, where photographs were taken of him lying on a concrete slab in a dismal laundry room. As hundreds of weeping locals filed past the body, many of these deeply Catholic people believed that Guevara's corpse was Christ-like in its hideous suffering. Freddie Alborta was the photographer who immortalised this last scene.

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I am not sure how Alborta’s post-mortem photograph of Che Guevara was released, but English art critic John Berger observed that it resembled two famous paintings: Rembrandt's very large work, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 and Andrea Mantegna's smaller Lamentation over the Dead Christ 1490. Berger had published many humanist essays and reviews in the New Statesman, and his strongly stated opinions on modern art made him a controversial and somewhat political figure. An early collection of essays, Permanent Red, made a clear statement of his own political commitments.
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Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, Royal Gallery Mauritshuis.

Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1490, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
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The powerful Catholic Church did little to condemn the greed of the ruling class in South America; instead of promoting social change and justice, it opted for the good order of the status quo. So it is doubly confusing for a humanist left wing art critic to be citing classical paintings in relation to a Marxist revolutionary from South America. However I think he was correct.

John Hess was also interested in the representation of Che Guevara as Christ, particularly following the publication of the post mortem photo in 1967. He quoted an Argentinian film maker who interviewed Freddy Alborta decades later and drew out the circumstances of the photograph. What were Alborta’s feelings and impressions? Did he know of John Berger’s interpretations of Alborta’s own photo?

Alborta did not, but he was very aware that this was not simple photo journalism. The photographer said he worked very carefully, knowing that he was in the presence of an already legendary figure, a Christ figure even, and that such a moment comes once in a life time.

Read: John Berger "Che Guevara: the moral factor", in The Urban Review, Volume 8, Number 3, September, 1975

Alfred Stieglitz and the art of photography

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was born in the USA to German speaking parents. In 1881, all the Stieglitz children were shipped off to Germany for their education and while a university undergraduate, Alfred learned to love two great pastimes: travel and photography. Amazingly, for a rank amateur, he had some of his photographic writing published in German magazines and had some of his photos accepted in German competitions. Even more amazingly, Alfred began to collect the first books of what would become a very large library on the art of photography.

Stieglitz sailed to the USA in 1890 and went into partnership in a photo engraving business. Five years later, he became editor of American Amateur Photographer and became a founding member of the Camera Club of New York. It must have seemed like a fascinating new career for the young man. His own photographs were soft-focus, atmospheric studies that he called Pictorialist. For a modernist, these soft-focus images must have seemed rather traditionalist and backward yearning.

Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers: The Coach, 1902

The Camera Club published a quarterly journal called Camera Notes, with Stieglitz as editor. The journal's readers might well have expected the exhibition reviews and technical articles, but I wonder if they were expecting academic essays on art and photography as well.

In 1902, Stieglitz was asked to prepare an exhibition of American Pictorialist photographers but the show was not backed by the Camera Club of New York. This split in the photographic world caused a new group, called the Photo-Secession, to emerge. The show opened in March 1902 under the banner of the new group. I suppose the world was well and truly aware of Secessionist art groups in Germany and Austria already, so Photo-Secession was merely another break-away group that linked photography to the art world. At some stage, the Photo-Secession had 120 photographers as paid up members.

Alfred Stieglitz, Steerage, 1907

Soon he established a new journal called Camera Work, from 1903 on. This journal specifically dedicated itself to the study of aesthetics, so Stieglitz sought essays and poetry from European writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde who might not have been noted for their work on the art of photography. The photogravures were produced so beautifully that images from Camera Work could be framed up and shown in photographic exhibitions in the USA and Europe.

The Photo-Secession didn’t have rooms for its exhibitions until 1905. It was then that Edward Steichen gave up his own photographic studio and offered it as a gallery and headquarters for the organisation. The Little Galleries of the Secession opened in Nov 1905. To make the connection with the Secession in Vienna even clearer, Edward Steichen designed the interior of the New York gallery to match the look of his Viennese hero, the architect Josef Hoffmann. The Little Galleries, at 291 Fifth Ave NY, looked uncluttered and modern. Obermeyer Force blog called "291" one of the most progressive art galleries of its time and called Stieglitz the patron saint of photography.

A 1906 exhibition of photography at "291"

Stieglitz certainly included avant garde European artists in The Little Galleries exhibitions eg Rodin and Matisse, even though I doubt that they would have been popular in the USA in the first decade of the century. As “untitled at the moment” noted, Picasso was even awarded his first US show there! Luckily the magazine Camera Work didn't worry about critical popularity as Little Galleries had to; it could include the works of modernist artists, and did.
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While he was enjoying significant artistic successes, money remained a constant problem. Most months the Little Galleries cost far more to operate than the income they achieved from print sales and from exhibition entry fees; membership in the Photo-Secession was declining and even subscriptions to Camera Work began to drop off. His father had left him a substantial amount of money in his will (in 1909) but it could not last forever. Wife Emmy’s inherited money was also running out.

City of Ambition, 1910

Susan van Wyk believed that Stieglitz played a critical role in mounting the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Allbright Art Gallery in Buffalo. The City of Ambition exhibition in 1910 showed a modernising, constantly changing New York and I suppose Stieglitz was changing his views at the same time.  Note the strong contrasts in City of Ambition, particularly in the foreground. The background became more muted with distance and from atmosphere.

After 1910, the shows put on at “291” started to be dominated by American and European painters; it was a meeting place for artists, writers and critics, rather than just for photographers. However it did continue to be a venue that supported artists through the sale and exhibition of their work. In January 1916, Stieglitz was shown a portfolio of drawings by a young artist named Georgia O'Keeffe. He loved her art, and without meeting O'Keeffe, he made plans to exhibit her work at 291.

A 1914 exhibition of Brancusi’s sculpture, at "291"

By 1917 young American men were being taken into the armed forces. The good times were over and Stieglitz left New York. He also sought a divorce from his wife, Emmy.

WorthPoint asked who were the 30 most influential American visual artists of the 20th Century? He thought Alfred Stieglitz was the seventh most important American in that 100 year period. I was well impressed, not only because Stieglitz was a fine photographer but also because he was one of the great sponsors of 20th-century modernist movements.

Julia Cameron, Lord Tennyson and the Isle of Wight

British woman Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), raised in India and educated in France, did not take up photography until the age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Yet her work had a huge impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits. Foto-Tube blog noted her soft focus and said that Cameron became known for her Arthurian legends in pictures. You can see beautiful examples of Cameron's photos in the Pre Raphaelite Art blog.

Cameron, Gareth and Lynette, 1874
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The Earthly Paradise blog made particular mention of the new Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibit . Her photography is on display at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine during 2009. This travelling exhibit will move to the Frick art and historical centre in Pittsburgh during the period Oct 2010 - Jan 2011.

The exhibition is called "For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron." The works included in the showing were put together for Julia Margaret Cameron's sister, Maria Mia Jackson. Cameron originally gave her sister the partially filled album as a gift in July 1863, at the beginning of Julia's experiments with photography. Over the years, Mia filled the album with many of her sister's most iconic images.

Induro and Little Augury blogs added new information. As well as being the grand dame of Victorian photography, Cameron was the great aunt to sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (both nee Stephen) . That was one, very impressive family.. The girls were avid amateur photographers during their young years, and became two visually creative adults in their aesthetic and personal lives. And feminists, of course.

The Gentleman Amateur's Blog said that Julia Margaret Cameron was known for two things: illustrations of poems & other texts, and portraits of her Victorian contemporaries. The illustrations look a little contrived today; but the portraits, especially the monumental head-shots, remain mesmerising to us moderns.

Since very long exposures were needed, typically up to quarter of an hour, two elements were set in place: a] Cameron had to use a tripod device to keep the camera still. And b] she used the collodion wet plate process. Those long exposures are partly responsible for the wonderful softness and blurring in her images, but there may have been something else as well. At a time when photographic sharpness was valued, Cameron ran the risk that her images would be seen as feminine and soft edged. But Cameron didn't seem to be operating accidentally. She created an ethereal sense that has survived well.

Clearly there are many bloggers interested in Cameron. I became particularly interested in her photographic art career via Alfred, Lord Tennyson. So if I want to add something special to the blogging world, I will need to focus on her time on the Isle of Wight, as did Graphic Arts blog.

Cameron, Lancelot and Guinevere 1874

Cameron’s career was a short one, covering no more than the last 11 years of her life. In 1874, she was living near to Alfred, Lord Tennyson at Farringford Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson had taken Morte D’Arthur, published in 1842, and expanded it into Idylls of the King in 1859. He asked Cameron to make illustrations for a new publication of these poems and she produced 200+ prints from wet-plate collodion-on-glass negatives. Unfortunately, the publisher chose only two to be reformatted as wood-engravings and she wasn't very happy with the results.

With Tennyson’s encouragement, as Graphic Arts blog showed, Cameron did in fact publish her own work with albumen silver prints interspersed with texts by Tennyson, lithographed from Cameron’s hand-writing. One volume appeared in Jan 1875 and the second in May, selling well. Both frontispieces had a portrait of Tennyson.

And it was her home on the Isle of Wight that gave her access to the Tennysons’ neighbouring home and to all the celebrities (eg Charles Darwin) who visited them. Of course Cameron's portraits were loved for their romantic quality and became well known because of their close association with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. But if it wasn’t for her closeness to the Tennysons, her career might well have stalled. In any case, she died in 1879, only five years after moving to the Isle of Wight.

Cameron, Sir Galahad and the Pale Nun, 1874

Her island house and studio, Dimbola Lodge, can still be visited today - it is open to the public as a photographic museum and exhibition space.