SJOTIME PHOTOGRAPHY

 

Julia Margaret Cameron

Paul and Virginia

1864

Albumen Print

 

This photograph was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1864. Cameron began her photographic career at the age of 48 when her daughter gave her a camera as a gift. She had no intention of taking studio like portraits or taking pictures of people she did not know well. She asked friends, slaves, and famous friends to stand in and pose for her pictures. What makes Cameron a unique photographer is the fact that her pictures are not just pictures of people. They are of people who are dressed up and posed to represent characters from famous literary works. This picture in particular represents the French Romantic novel Paul Et Virginie. This novel revolves around a shipwreck during which a heroine must shed her clothes to be rescued. She refuses and is therefore killed. Cameron did not attempt to represent an actual scene from the novel, but instead represent the surrounding environment in the story. Here Cameron shows the tropical setting with the bamboo-handled parsal, scattered greenery by the feet of the children, and the disheveled drapery of the children. Instead of depicting a narrative, Cameron depicts a universal underlying theme from the novel.

 

Unique is by far an understatement for the works of Cameron. Especially during her lifetime, these photgraphs were not taken seriously. Today however, photographs such as Paul and Virginia show a great amount of talent Cameron had for her time period. The mood of the photograph is somber as two young children seem to be alone in the world with an umbrella possibly on the side of the road. Neither of them look staged as their gazes seem lost and directed past the camera. Although I have not read the novel Cameron based this picture on, I would say that it captures a novel scene quite well. Cameron achieves this task by having her models and environment be as naturalistic as possible. The qualities these models have are fantastic. Both would have had to stand in for this shot for a long amount of time due to exposure time. Their expressions represent a lonesome and somber life, the same mood/tone most would assume after reading the small section of the novel. The lack of color, lack of happiness, and lack of a well defined environment truly captures the qualities of a novel and its characters because it allows viewers to make their own story, just like novels allow a reader to create their own characters and scene in their head.