Your loving auntie & God mama,Julia Cameron

Abstract

Written almost immediately upon her return from her 10 years in India, and probably at her temporary residence, Ephrahim Common, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, this note is a typical example of Mrs Cameron's effusive, loving style. The letter dates from a time 15 years before Julia Margaret touched a camera, and it is to her niece Julia PrinsepJackson, who was then only two years old. She was a god-daughter to Mrs Cameron, and later her most frequent model. Indeed, Julia Jackson (1846–1895) became one of the most beautiful of 19th-century women. Her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died in 1870, and eight years later she married Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Two of her children became famous: Vanessa Bell as a painter, Virginia Woolf as a writer. Julia eventually wrote the DNB entry (from ‘personal knowledge’) of her eccentric aunt, who was renowned for her taste in shawls, her generosity in giving them as presents, and for fixing the images of certain 19th-century great men for all time. The ‘two Hardinges’ refers at least in part to Julia Margaret's son Hardinge Hay Cameron, godson of Lord Hardinge, the recently-retired Governor-General of India     

Photography and the Elphinstone Institution of Bombay

Abstract

Ralizing the potentials of photography, the Court of Directors of the East India company recommended to the Government of Bombay as early as 1845 ‘the encouragement of the study of this useful art of photography in any of the seientific or educational institutions under the control or inf1uence of your government’. They also offered to furnish students with the requisite apparatus, if they found it necessary to procure them from England¹. The proposal was repeated in their dispatch dated 29th December 1854, when they again expressed their desire to establish training in photography. Thereupon, W. Hart, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, requested the Board of Education of Bombay Presidency to submit a scheme for carrying out this project². Mr Stowell, Secretary to the Board of Education, called for the opinions of the Principal of the Elphinstone Institution, and of its Professor of Chemistry³. A small but interesting episode of early photography in India had its beginning in this way.     

M. O. Hammond of Toronto

Abstract

‘Mr Hammond, you have a good way of sensing public taste’,¹ remarked an official of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in 1926, during a discussion with members of the Toronto Camera Club (TCC) about the annual International Salon of Photography. ‘Mr Hammond’ was the journalist and amateur photographer M. O. Hammond (1876-1934),² a fixture in the Toronto culture scene since 1906 when he had become literary editor and a reviewer of art exhibitions for the newspaper The Globe. He was well known for his efforts to encourage and publish Canadian writers and artists. His three books³ and numerous newspaper and magazine articles popularized Canadian history, art, and literature, and were frequently illustrated by his own photographs.     

The success of Samuel Bourne in India

Abstract

In their 1955 edition of The History of Photography Helmut and Alison Gernsheim noted that the work of Samuel Bourne has ‘undeservedly fallen into oblivion’. They recognized the outstanding quality of the photographs produced on Bourne's excursions in India during the 1860s, including three arduous treks into the western Himalayas. By drawing on the young Englishman's own engaging accounts of his exploits in the mountains — a series of articles published in The British Journal of Photography — the Gernsheims were able to provide ‘an impression of a truly unique achievement’.¹ This initial effort to rescue Bourne from the limbo of forgotten landscapists was continued some twenty years later when his expeditionary work was featured in Ann Turner's BBC television series, ‘Pioneers of Photography’, which was brought out in book form by Aaron Scharf in 1976.² Other serious examinations of Bourne's photographs soon followed, the most significant of these being Arthur Ollman's brief but excellent monograph published in conjunction with an exhibition sponsored by the Friends of Photography in California.³ While the collective writings on Bourne thus ensured his entry into the mainstream of photo-history and provided the groundwork for future studies, numerous questions still remained unanswered regarding Bourne's entry into the photographic trade in India, his professional success, and the impact of his work on his contemporaries. Moreover, previous discussions of the artist's pictorial accomplishments have been limited to selected works with little or no investigation of the possible meanings attached to variations of formats and subtly interrelated series of images, including their cultural and social significance.⁴     

The Poet's Pose

Abstract

In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennyson's house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’¹. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph that was taken was of an angry old man, with a head resembling the crest of a stormy wave; emotional, strong, raw, and indisputably great. A later critic speculated on a century that could allow men to grow into that special mould of greatness so evident in their very look, and we may also speculate on how they found the photographers who could mirror them so well.     

Correspondence: Images of native Americans II

Abstract

The Navajo people of the American Southwest have been abundantly photographed since the beginnings of photography's extension into Western America — indeed, from almost since the beginnings of photography itself. Navajoland ‘offered’ dramatic landscapes and ‘The People’¹ have served as exemplar for an assorted series of Western projects, changes in Western projects, and objects of Western desire. The photographs of Native Americans by Edward S. Curtis, though largely ignored during his lifetime, emerged shortly after his death in 1952 to become popular icons, which were so dramatic a phenomenon from the 1960s that today they are something of a cliché. ‘Original’ prints currently sell for thousands of dollars.² This resurrection is also characteristic among specialists on Native Americans. Indeed, after having been neglected and abused by anthropology for many years for his elaborate staging, soft focus, excessive pastoral romanticism and nostalgia, Curtis has more recently become fashionable again and now enjoys something of an anthropological embrace.³     

Lewis Hine

Abstract

‘I'm afraid, Mr Hine, that you haven't the broad sociological background required,’ said a distinguished adviser when Lewis W. Hine announced his decision to give up teaching at the Ethical Culture School and set up as a ‘social’ photographer. ‘Nonsense,’ retorted Arthur Kellogg, ‘it's wonderful to find a photographer who has any sociological background’.     

19th century indian photographers in India

Abstract

It may never be possible to discover who was the first person to use a camera in India. Dr A. Toussaint considers it likely that the Frenchman, Jules Léger, may have taken photographs during his visit to India before establishing a photographic studio in Mauritius in February 1845¹. Josiah Rowe, a Calcutta surveyor, was hailed as ‘the father of photography in India’ by Dr F. J. Mouat, the first president of the Bengal Photographic Society, but as yet no photographs have been found that can be attributed to him. The earliest known photographs were taken by John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company's army, during the second Sikh War in 1848-49. He had no doubts about the pleasures of photography:

I would strongly recommend every assistant-surgeon to make himself master of photography in all its branches, on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plate. I have practised it for many years, and know of no extra-professional pursuit that will repay him for all the expense and trouble (and both are very considerable) than this fascinating study².     

The photographic experiments of Henry Brougham

Abstract

Of all the British claimants to the invention of photography, Henry Brougham is the one whose experiments have been given least attention in existing histories of photography. In his posthumously published three-volume autobiography of 1871, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, written by himself, Brougham claimed to have engaged in some ‘experiments upon light and colours’ during the years 1794-–5 (when he was 16 years of age). He had, he tells us, included a discussion of his experiments in a paper offered to the Royal Society in 1795. Most of this paper, his first in the field of natural philosophy, was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions (No. 86) of 1796 under the title ‘Experiments and observations on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light’. The paper, as published, was an attempt to discover analogous relationships between the bending of light within bodies (refraction or, using the 18th-century term, ‘refrangibility’) and the bending of light outside of bodies (reflection and diffraction or, in Brougham's terminology, flexion). As he wrote in the opening lines of his paper:

It has always appeared wonderful to me, since nature seems to delight in those close analogies which enable her to preserve simplicity and even uniformity in variety, that there should be no dispositions in the parts of light, with respect to inflection and reflection, analogous or similar to their different refrangibility. In order to ascertain the existence of such properties, I began a course of experiments and observations, a short account of which forms the substance of this paper.¹     

John Thomson (1837–1921)

Abstract

Abstract Thomson did some of his most important work in Asia but was not, of course, the first European photographer to travel there. Thus, Eliphalet Brown, Jr. had accompanied Commodore Perry's expedition to Asia in 1852–1854. His daguerreotypes were reproduced by means of woodcuts and lithographs in the official report of the expedition. A Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan ¹. Felice Beato photographed the Crimean War of 1855 with James Robertson, continued eastward photographing India during the next five years, and then attached himself to the Anglo-French campaign against China. There he covered the capture of Fort Taku at Tiensin, and later the destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace north of Peking in October 1860. Thomson appeared on the site 10 years later. He photographed Fort Taku also, and noted that it ‘looked like a deserted mud quarry’².     

‘Princess’ Alice

Abstract

Burr Mcintosh had an enviable job as a photographer; at the turn of the century, he was called the ‘special photographer … to [a popular] Theodore Roosevelt’¹. With such credentials, Mcintosh accompanied William Howard Taft's Republican peace entourage to the Philippines and to China in 1905, bathing in the knowledge that his calling and appointment were secure. He was obviously smitten by ‘the Princess’, Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's headstrong daughter, and took every opportunity to photograph her with the other politicos on the junket. Alice mentions these events m her autobiography, Crowded Hours     

Edward Steichen

Abstract

‘The camera’, Steichen wrote in 1947, ‘serves as an instrument for waging war and as an historian in recording the war’.¹ He spoke from experience. By this time, as a veteran of both world wars, he was reflecting upon a long life devoted to photography as art, as an advertising medium, as social commentary, and as war documentation. Although Steichen often used his camera as a very effective propaganda device in wartime, his hatred of war motivated him to use the same instrument to persuade people that war would never provide a lasting solution to human problems.²     

Indian Courtesans in Cartes - de - Visite

Abstract

Cartes-de-visite of the nineteenth century covered a wide spectrum of subjects, and were indeed ‘an interface between photography and the social scene’¹. People wanted to have their photographs taken ‘to share among friends and to express, social standing’²; the likenesses were ‘inexpensive, easy to look at and easy to care for’³, and much cheaper than a painter's miniature, providing a commercial application of photography in sales of the object depicted. Indeed, Oliver Wendell Holmes called them ‘the greenbacks of civilisation’⁴.     

Mario Cresci's

Abstract

‘Any claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of foolish fancy. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the idea of totality .... Reality is opaque; but there are certain points — clues, symptoms — which allow us to decipher it’.¹ Searching for an epistemological model, or paradigm in the social sciences, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote these words in an essay published in 1979 under the title ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’. Ginzburg was able to weave into his essay many threads in an interdisciplinary discussion on the research method used, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by an Italian art connoisseur (Giovanni Morelli), a physician in Vienna (Sigmund Freud), and a British writer of detective stories (Arthur Conan Doyle). What unified their method was the attention paid to ‘marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues’,² for the attribution of a painting, the analysis of a symptom, and the discovery of a criminal. In his own work, Ginzburg considered this paradigm as an effective research method for the study of obscure fields of human culture, such as witchcraft and popular beliefs.³     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

Thomas Annan and the scottish landscape

Abstract

Thomas Annan (1830–87) was a successful Scottish photographer who produced work in all the main subject categories associated with commercial practice in the midnineteenth century, including portraiture, landscape, urban and industrial documentation and reproductions of works of art. While it is true that the versatility and range of his achievement have not gone unacknowledged, his reputation today undoubtedly rests on one particular body of work— his survey of Glasgow's High Street slums, first published in 1871 as Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.¹ Stark, shocking, and yet strangely hypnotic, the images in this book are among the earliest as well as the most powerful of their kind ever made. They are also sufficiently ambiguous in their status as ‘representations’ to have provided a fruitful target for critical analysis among cultural historians anxious to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of the nineteenth-century documentary project as a whole.² Old Streets and Closes is in every way an outstanding work. It speaks eloquently of a now vanished past, while confronting us with the inherently paradoxical nature of photography's contribution to historical discourse.     

That oriental streak In Julia Margaret Cameron's Ancestry

Abstract

The fact that Julia Margaret Cameron's father, James Pattie, had a family tradition of service in India, under the East India Company, long before 1715, when the first Pattie is known to have died there,¹ made ‘one of the present day descendants suggest jokingly that the name may originally have been Patel’.² However, there is no reason to believe that Pattie was of any other stock than English.³ Nevertheless, writing of the famous Pattle sisters, Brian Hill said: ‘... the seven sisters were of half English, half French origin. If, as has been conjectured, they also had Indian blood, it is conceivable that it was derived from the girls' grandmother, a French woman born and bred in India. In the eighteenth century alliances between Europeans and high caste Indian women were not regarded with much disfavour, and the intermingling of race often resulted in great beauty in the children. Certainly, the lustrous hair and dark expressive eyes of the Pattie sisters have a quality of Oriental beauty about them.’⁴     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.