On view: Julia Margaret Cameron
Exciting: Our first guest review!
This is the newsletter behind Exhibits in New York, a forthcoming iOS app that lets you track and review shows in the city. New version out this week, but in the meantime, a review from writer and educator, Victoria Olsen, on Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron, an exhibit highlighting the 19th century British photographer and chronicler of Victorian high society. -Sarah + Alexandra
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron
Outside the Morgan Library, one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s canonical photographs hangs from the formal stone edifice. Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die! (1867) towers above Madison Avenue as the banner for a new exhibit of the artist’s work. Inside, the image is framed so that visible splotches of photochemicals—evidence of Cameron’s improvisational approach to the then-new art of photography—are plainly visible. To make her pioneering photographs in mid-Victorian England, Cameron had to prepare and manipulate large glass plates, expose them while they were still wet, then immediately develop them in a nearby darkroom. Later, she would make contact prints from her negatives in the sunlight. The resulting work was sometimes smeared, cracked, or otherwise flawed. But Cameron found beauty in what her peers considered mistakes.
Julia Margaret Cameron is best known for her celebrated portraits of “Victorian Famous Men and Fair Women,” as her great-niece, Virginia Woolf, described them. In this exhibit, portraits of luminaries like Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Browning hang alongside allegorical portrayals of her maids and friends, as well as intimate portraits of her children and grandchildren. As a graduate student in Victorian Literature, I knew Cameron first through her homages to famous men. But as her biographer, I grew to love and admire the lesser-known images of the people in her household, posing as characters in amateur theatricals.
This exhibit includes the full range of Cameron’s work, highlighting her experimentation, from imaginative storytelling to the soft-focus close-ups that make her Victorian celebrities seem vulnerable and present. I was initially daunted by this selection of Cameron’s “best work” from the Victoria and Albert Museum, for personal and professional reasons. Would the informal, or technically imperfect, photographs get short shrift here? Could I still consider myself a Cameron scholar, or would I feel like an imposter? But while the setting at the Morgan may feel intimidating, seeing Cameron’s photographs—with their obvious play-acting and surprising spontaneity—charmed me all over again. The exhibit functions as an invitation into Cameron’s extended family. On view through September 14.
Victoria Olsen
is the author of the biography From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography (2003). She writes the newsletter From Life about art, family, and research.
also on view in the city:
Karimah Ashadu, Machine Boys, at Canal Projects. Through July 26.
John Brock Lear, The Devotional Figure, at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts. Through July 27.
Luana Vitra: Amulets, at Sculpture Center. Through July 28.
pitch us!
We love putting this newsletter together, but we want to hear from you. You can pitch us a short review (between 100-300 words) to run in this newsletter two ways: email pitches@exhibitsinnewyork.com, or, if you’re using the app, send a screenshot of your review to @pitches or on Instagram.
We’re looking for sensitive observations about a show; we want context (how the art is situated in the world) and affect (a gut response) to coexist. We’re hoping you can match your area of expertise (what you studied in school, what you know through experience) with the exhibit you choose to review, and a successful pitch will see ways to make observations beyond what’s written in the wall text. Selected submissions will go through an editorial review, run in our newsletter with credit, and you’ll be paid.
Thanks, Alexandra and Sarah, for this really collaborative effort!