The V&A Touring Exhibition Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron explores the path-breaking career of photography’s first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815–1879) was born in Calcutta (modern day Kolkata) to a French mother and an English father; in 1848, with her husband and children, she moved to England, where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they traveled. Residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48. In only eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.
Cameron’s prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a mode that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Most distinct of all was Cameron’s wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident, and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective focus, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.
Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London’s South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron’s large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir manuscript Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.
The exhibition was developed by the V&A's Lisa Springer, International Programmes Curator, and Curator Marta Weiss who acted as curatorial advisor; and for the Morgan Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, and Allison Pappas, Jane P. Watkins Assistant Curator of Photography.
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
Until 14 September 2025
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
See more and selected images here: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/arresting-beauty
Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, A Group of Kalutara Peasants, 1878, albumen print. The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund. Museum no. RPS.1093-2017
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