Julia Margaret Cameron: A Woman who Breathed Life into Photographs

A pioneer of photography as a fine art form, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was known for spiritual, soulful portraits of subjects who, like the artist herself, came from the British Empire's Victorian upper class. Born in colonial India, educated in France and never interested in photography before receiving her first camera as a forty-eighth birthday present from her daughter in 1863, she quickly set out to create experimental imagery and shot artists, poets and thinkers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. This exhibition consists of around 150 photographs and related materials, including several vintage prints, and aims to shed light on both Cameron's creative process and on what drove her to develop such innovative methods in the face of criticism from the Victorian orthodoxy.