Forty-One False Starts (22 page)

Another story Gernsheim tells about Cameron's relentless benevolence toward the Taylors concerns a “particularly valuable shawl” that Alice Taylor had accepted

only under the threat that otherwise it would be thrown into the fire. After an interval to allow Mrs. Cameron's feelings to calm down, it was returned, and nothing more was said. But it was impossible to defeat Mrs. Cameron. She sold the shawl, and with the proceeds bought an expensive invalid sofa which she presented in Mrs. Taylor's name to the hospital for incurables at Putney. The matter came to light many months later when Alice Taylor had occasion to visit the hospital and, to her astonishment, saw her name inscribed as donor.

The resourcefulness Cameron developed in the course of her subjugation of the Taylors (according to Gernsheim, Cameron “told Mrs. Taylor that before the year was over she would love her like a sister,” and Mrs. Taylor evidently did) stood her in good stead when she began to “try to photograph.” Photography in the 1860s was not for sissies. You did not snap the shutter and someone else did the rest. What you had to do was akin to Marie Curie's extraction of radium from pitchblende. The wet collodion process (then the state-of-the-art method) required a combination of dexterity and stamina that only the most fanatically motivated of amateurs could command. “I worked fruitlessly, but not hopelessly,” Cameron wrote in an unfinished autobiographical account called
Annals of My Glass House
. “I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass . . . when holding it triumphantly to dry.”

Cameron's defeat was characteristically short-lived; she rapidly mastered the collodion process and went on to produce photographs by which not only her immediate family was charmed (“My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause,” she wrote in
Annals
, and went on in her breathless, unstinting way to report that “this habit of running into the dining room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrite of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household”), but which won the praise of a larger world and presently came to number among the monuments of photography. However, not all of Cameron's photographs became monuments.

Early on, a distinction was drawn between the photographs of single individuals and the group pictures (Cameron called them “fancy-subject” pictures), in which two or more costumed (or, in the case of children, nude or seminude) sitters enacted, under Cameron's direction, scenes from the Bible, mythology, Shakespeare, or Tennyson. In the critical essay that followed Woolf's biographical one in
Famous Men and Fair Women
, Roger Fry set the terms of the yes-and-no discourse on Cameron's photography that was to remain in place for more than half a century. He heaped praise on the individual portraits, placing them in “the universal and dateless world” of Rembrandt, and dismissed the group pictures as so much Victorian ephemera. “These must all be judged as failures from an aesthetic standpoint,” he wrote of the fancy-subject pictures, mystifyingly excepting a photograph called
The Rosebud Garden of Girls
. Gernsheim, who had escalated Woolf's remarks about Cameron's looks to “Julia was charmingly, hopelessly, pathetically plain,” similarly heightened the harshness of Fry's estimate of the fancy-subject pictures: “If the majority of Mrs. Cameron's subject pictures seem to us affected, ludicrous and amateurish, and appear in our opinion to be failures, how masterly, on the other hand, are her straightforward, truthful portraits, which are entirely free from false sentiment, and which compensate for the errors of taste in her studies.” Subsequent writers on Cameron, among them Cecil Beaton, Edward Lucie-Smith, Quentin Bell, Brian Hill, and Ben Maddow, unquestioningly perpetuated the idea that only some of her work was worth looking at, and that a lot of it was an embarrassment.

In 1984 a book with the quiet title
Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815–1879
was published in England, and it almost crackled with the indignation of its author, an Oxford professor named Mike Weaver, who couldn't bear the way Cameron and her work had been, as he saw it, condescended to and misjudged by Woolf, Fry, et al. Here is Weaver's testy commentary on the legend of the wacky great-aunt:

The story that her children gave her a camera to pacify her while [Charles Cameron] was away . . . is another of those many anecdotes which aim to rob her of her dignity as woman and artist, and have taken the place of criticism of her work . . . The anecdotes attempt to turn her into a blue-stocking. She is depicted as obsessed with old-fashioned shawls, with fingers stained with chemicals (what do women know about science?) . . . Some have suggested it was all too much for poor Charles and other alleged “victims,” but there is no sign of conflict between them, rather a sense of deep and lasting relationship based on mutual admiration. She was the Mrs. Gaskell of photography. She seems to have accepted maternity and marriage as high and holy offices, and lived an active life in which art relieved her from daily household cares. She was not an invalid, not repressed, and not inadequate. She was a nice-looking woman, who was a fine person. Her sisters, all younger than her, for all their famed beauty, could not hold a candle to her. A Christian artist, she submitted her passions and her pride to the will of others, and, above all, to God. If it were not so unfashionable, I would have called her a genius . . .

Far from dismissing the fancy-subject pictures as kitsch, Weaver holds them up as the essential core of Cameron's oeuvre, the culminating expression of the Christian piety by which, in his view, all her photography is animated—the “straightforward,” secular-seeming portraits no less than the explicitly religious compositions—and to which her aesthetic ambition was always subservient. What Gernsheim saw as “false sentiment” and “errors of taste,” Weaver sees as an enterprise of confident seriousness and sincerity. Weaver proposes the typological tradition of Bible reading—whereby characters and themes in the Hebrew scriptures are identified as prefigurations of characters and themes in the New Testament (Rachel at the well anticipating the angel at the tomb, for example, or the infant Samuel anticipating the infant Jesus)—as a model for the decoding of the problematic group pictures. Through his study of Anna Jameson's
Sacred and Legendary Art
, among other nineteenth-century texts, Weaver imagines himself into the imagination of Cameron, where, he believes, the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare's plays, and Tennyson's poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty. The vision's matrix was the Renaissance, medieval, and Pre-Raphaelite art with which Cameron, as a woman of culture, was intimately familiar.

In a second book,
Whisper of the Muse
, Weaver expands and deepens his account of Cameron as a major religious artist, further naturalizing her “magnificent contribution” in the now very far country of Victorian Christian aesthetic theory (John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Charles Cameron, who had written an essay on the sublime, are among his sources). He continues to spring at the throats of “those who charge her with eccentricity.” “They deserve our indignation. It is a cheap calumny against a completely
centered
woman,” he writes.

Weaver's fierce reappraisal has been very influential. The fancy-subject pictures have become the object of appreciative study, and the funny stories about the woman “of ardent speech and picturesque behavior” are no longer routinely retailed. Sylvia Wolf, the curator of the
Cameron's Women
show, almost entirely excludes them from her sober-sided feminist catalog essay, from which Cameron emerges as a woman of no particular oddness. Weaver's empathic understanding of Cameron—his insistence that we approach her as an advanced Christian thinker rather than as the heroine of a screwball comedy—has obviously had weight with Wolf. The trouble is that Cameron
was
the heroine of a screwball comedy. There is too much evidence of the picturesque behavior for it to be summarily dismissed as a calumny. Virginia Woolf and Gernsheim did not invent the anecdotes: they gratefully took them from Cameron's contemporaries (notably her best friend, the painter G. F. Watts, and her good friend Annie Thackeray) and, most tellingly, from Cameron herself. It is, after all, from Cameron's own
Annals
that the story of the camera given “to amuse you, mother” derives, as does the image of Cameron rushing into the dining room and dripping silver nitrite all over the linen of the table at which poor Charles is trying to eat.

But above all, it is the photographs themselves that confirm the
You Can't Take It with You
character of life at Freshwater and that oblige us to demur from Weaver's presentation of Cameron as a Raphael or Giotto of the camera. If Cameron's Madonna and Child pictures and her illustrations of scenes from Tennyson seem less silly to us than they did to the puritanical modernists, even the most catholic of postmodernists will have to acknowledge that these photographs bear unmistakable traces of the conditions under which they were taken, and that these conditions were often comical. In a group picture in the
Cameron's Women
show called
May Day
, for example, the five flower-bedecked figures look as if they had been brought together not to celebrate the annual renewal of life, but to illustrate the memoir of the lady who said she felt as if her eyes were coming out of her head. A little girl in the foreground (who, in actuality, was a little boy named Freddy Gould, the son of a local fisherman) stares into the middle distance with an unforgettably glazed expression of resigned misery. Another subject picture—a Madonna and Child composition called
Goodness
—would be more aptly named
Sulkiness
, after the expression of the child who is representing the infant Jesus, and who obviously hates every minute of her modeling assignment.

These traces, of course, are what give the photographs their life and charm. If Cameron had succeeded in her project of making seamless works of illustrative art, her work would be among the curiosities of Victorian photography—such as Henry Peach Robinson's waxen
Fading Away
and Oscar Gustave Rejlander's extravagantly awful
The Two Ways of Life
—rather than among its most vital images. Cameron liked to make albums of her photographs and to thrust them upon friends and influential people in rather the way she thrust shawls on the Taylors. (Lord Overstone, Victor Hugo, and George Eliot were among the sometimes puzzled objects of her largesse. It is also said that she tipped porters with photographs.) These collections were not family albums. They were intended not to fix the fleeting moments of family life, but to record Cameron's triumphant progress through the precincts of High Art. And yet, in many respects, Cameron's compositions have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives who have been herded together for the obligatory group picture than they do to the masterpieces of Western painting. In Raphael and Giotto there are no infant Christs whose faces are blurred because they moved, or who are looking at the viewer with frank hatred. Gernsheim wrote of Cameron's illustrations of Tennyson as attempts to do “something photography cannot and should not be made to do . . . When she tried to illustrate an action, the results are reminiscent of poor amateur theatricals, and are unintentionally comic. In these she has certainly overshot the mark of what is acceptable—to our generation—in artificiality.” Gernsheim added that “most attempts to illustrate the unreal by a medium whose main contribution to art lies in its realism are doomed to failure.”

But it is precisely the camera's realism—its stubborn obsession with the surface of things—that has given Cameron's theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. It is the truth of the sitting, rather than the fiction that all the dressing up was in aid of, that wafts out of these wonderful and strange, not-quite-in-focus photographs. They are what they are: pictures of housemaids and nieces and husbands and village children who are dressed up as Madonnas and infant Jesuses and John the Baptists and Lancelots and Guineveres and trying desperately hard to sit still. The way each sitter endures his or her ordeal is the collective action of the photograph, its “plot,” so to speak. When we look at a narrative painting, we can suspend our disbelief; when we look at a narrative photograph, we cannot. We are always aware of the photograph's doubleness—of each figure's imaginary
and
real persona. Theater can transcend its doubleness, can make us believe (for at least some of the time) that we are seeing only Lear or Medea. Still photographs of theatrical scenes can never escape being pictures of actors. What gives Cameron's pictures of actors their special quality—their status as treasures of photography of an unfathomably peculiar sort—is their singular combination of amateurism and artistry.

Weaver's characterization of Cameron as a genius does not seem to me exaggerated in regard to her grasp of the possibilities offered by photography for transcendent formal achievement. “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me,” Cameron wrote in her
Annals
. Every amateur photographer knows this feeling. But only a few amateurs (Lartigue is another) have understood what is involved in this arrest. For a beautiful child's beauty to survive the camera's withering gaze, much propitiatory activity by the photographer is required. Cameron knew, for example, that the clothes children normally wear (in Victorian times no less than in ours) are among the camera's most potent weapons against the pedophilia of the photographing aunt or grandmother. Instead of a beautiful child, the camera will deliver a competition between a face and a dress or snowsuit, a clash between the delicacy and translucency of young skin and the coarse materiality of fashionable dress. A great-niece of Cameron's named Laura Gurney recalled the day when she and her sister Rachel were “pressed into the service of the camera [as] . . . two Angels of the Nativity, and to sustain them we were scantily clad and each had a heavy pair of swan wings fastened to her narrow shoulders, while Aunt Julia, with ungentle hand, tousled our hair to get rid of its prim nursery look.” But clearly Aunt Julia knew what she was doing to give her vision of childhood beauty its best possible shot at being transmitted onto the wet glass plate. If it would be too much to say that Cameron chose religious and literary themes simply as an escape from Victorian costume, there is no question that her draperies and veils and turbans and crowns and coats of mail gave her a considerable aesthetic advantage over the studio photographers and fellow amateurs who took their sitters as they came.