Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography

A bold new study of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Victorian photographs, charting the legacy of colonialism following the 1857 Indian Uprising.

Julia Margaret Cameron, the celebrated Victorian photographer, was a child of the colonies. Born in 1815 in Calcutta, she was the daughter of a governing official of the East India Company. After relocating to London in 1848, Cameron was embraced by other British expatriates and a celebrated cultural network. This circle included literary personalities like Thackeray and Tennyson, painters and critics associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and political figures like Thomas Babington Macaulay and Lord Lansdowne.

In 1857, Indians rebelled against British rule, and in London, Cameron became absorbed by news of the Uprising. In the aftermath of the revolt, national and imperial politics transfixed England, some seven years before Cameron took up photography. The impact of those forces, and the inspiration of the literary, artistic, and political works produced by her circle, influenced her earliest imagery. Through close readings of these photographs, which she assembled in
photographic albums, this book exposes how Cameron embedded in her work a visual rhetoric of imperial power.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Jeff Rosen is a former academic dean at Loyola University Chicago and professor of art history at Columbia College Chicago. He is now a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, Chicago.