J. MARGARET CAMERON A POETRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Renowned photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her portraits evocative of prominent Victorians including John Herschel, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Taylor, George Frederic Watts, Ellen Terry and Julia Stephen. This study of her work reveals how convinced she was of the possibilities poetics of his medium, in particular his capacity to suggest rather than to give a literal meaning. She has not succeeded on all counts, and her practice violated the aesthetic orthodoxy of the time. But the blurring of the "real" subject in front of his lens has created unparalleled possibilities for more research wide of the sublime and the beautiful. Drawing on more than 100 pieces of the photographic collections of the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum Oxford University, as well as on comparative works of art, this book celebrates a collection that illustrates the aesthetic evolution of the photographer, his first images to his most poetic photographs. He understands also her own poetry and the key images she created for her extraordinary illustrations of Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other poems, demonstrating his fascination with the artistic link between poetry and photography.