Following on from two previous tours the art historian Aneela de Soysa has arranged a further 14-day tour of Sri Lanka with a focus on Julia Margaret Cameron's final years in the country. Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most influential photographers of her nineteenth century and spent the last four years of her life in Ceylon. In 1875, aged 60, she and her husband Charles, then 80, left for British Ceylon to join four of their sons. By then she had made more than 1,000 photographs during a twelve-year career in England. Fewer than 30 of her Ceylon photographs survive.
The journey explores the social, cultural and economic context in which these final photographs were made, while introducing nineteenth-century colonial photography in Sri Lanka. Cameron's Ceylon images include plantation workers, villagers in Kalutara and portraits of the botanical artist Marianne North. The visit will also explore ancient sites which connect directly to the Cameron family: Hardinge Cameron was involved in restoration work at Anuradhapura, while Charles Hay Cameron made an early colonial drawing of the Sacred Bodhi Tree in 1830 after travelling through dense jungle to reach it.
Full details of the itinerary and cost can be found in the attached brochure which can be downloaded from the website, below.
Sri Lanka: Julia Margaret Cameron. Photography, Empire and the Island
31 January-13 February 2027
led by Aneela de Soysa
https://www.aneeladesoysa.com/
