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Chronicler of an Era: The Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron
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23796 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 2004 |
1,942 Words |
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Amateur photography is taken for granted today. Anyone can point a camera, see a picture through the viewfinder, press a little button, and the camera clicks and winds. You finish the roll, have it developed and printed, and the brightly colored prints are delivered to you across the counter. There is little sense of process from object to image.
It is not easy to cast the imagination back almost two centuries, when the creation of a photograph was messy (in fact poisonous, involving potassium cyanide); it was also long, laborious, and--where portraits were concerned--the necessarily lengthy exposure times often made it a hit-and-miss affair. The results were usually stagy, somewhat stiff images produced by a photographer who had first to mix a stew of chemicals and collodion, spread it carefully and evenly over a thin glass plate, insert this into a large box camera, and expose it, not for fractions of a second but for minutes, while the plate was still wet. It was developed with a solution of pyrogallic acid, with cyanide used to remove any excess. The fragile negative was then printed. In such circumstances it was surprising that many photographs of any kind survived, let alone those that can be considered works of art today.
In 1864 Julia Margaret Cameron, the Anglo-Indian wife of an official in British India, wrote to her friend, the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel:
"At the beginning of this year I first took up Photography ie my kind and loving son Charles Norman gave me a Camera and I set to work alone & unassisted to see what I could
... (1898 of 11887 Characters)
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