Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1875) was already forty-eight when she received her camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. The year 1863 is considered to be a starting point of her career as a photographer, which, was rather short – only 11 years in total. It is known that the fame did not come to Cameron at once; at first, her photographs were regarded as ‘mistakes’ due to the fact she took an unusual approach to photography and treated it as an art.
As the photographer later wrote in her unfinished memoir “Annals of my glass house”, from the moment of the first shot, the camera had become a link to the world of artists, scientists, and writers. Naturally, Cameron’s beginner steps were quite uncertain: she had little idea of how to focus a sitter or where to place a dark box. However, during the next eighteen months, she had sold eighty printed photographs to the Victoria and Albert Museum and even managed to establish a studio within its walls.
It needs to be mentioned that the photographer never had any interest in arranging a commercial studio. In the majority of cases, she preferred to picture her own family, household staff, and close friends. Cameron often referred to costuming as the means to transform her models into religious and literary figures: her maid was once the Madonna, and her husband is known to try the role of Merlin. Inspired by the Italian spiritual concept of the fifteenth century, the woman put forward all the artistic goals in what referred to as photography. Alas, those goals were not understood in the right manner by other photographers of her time and, thus, Cameron had to look for acceptance elsewhere. Luckily, pre-Raphaelite artists had found her works exciting and then helped to become a symbol of modern photographers’ inspiration.