Victorian Photography

Photograph by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)
The students on the MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture programme are currently thinking about the role of photography in nineteenth-century culture. How far did the technological developments associated with photography and cinema affect the ways in which people saw the world? How did photographs and film mediate reality? These are the questions we'll be considering as we explore the work of some of the photographers of this period.

 Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)
by Tara Kavanagh
Heralded as a pioneer of photography, Julia Cameron didn’t pick up a camera until she was 48. She wrote: ‘From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour […] and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour’.[1]  She is remembered as one of the most innovative photographers of the age who, in her eleven-year career, captured some of the most famous intellectual and cultural figures of the Victorian age, including Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. She aspired to ‘ennoble Photography’ and see it elevated as an art form to equal painting and sculpture.  Her first exhibition, held at the South Kensington (now V&A) Museum in 1865, elicited mixed reviews. However, William Michael Rossetti deemed her work ‘magnificent’ and Coventry Patmore declared that Cameron was ‘the first person who had the wit to see her mistakes were her successes, and henceforward to make her portraits systematically out of focus’.[2]  The Photographic News, however, wasn’t so complimentary: ‘what in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black did call this photography[?]’[3]
She rejected the style adopted by commercial photographers - who were encouraged by photographic societies to produce conventional portraits - in favour of experimentation with light.  Her lighting techniques were years ahead of their time: she adopted soft focus (accidentally, initially) which was criticised as ‘slovenly’ and ‘full of errors’ by her contemporaries. But pre-Raphaelite artists applauded her dramatic use of light and shade, for which she is acclaimed as influencing both Pictorialism and later Surrealist photography.[4]  Her compositions, with minimalistic backdrops and dramatic close-ups are incredibly modern (figs 1&2). She mastered complex developing techniques, experimented with use of multiple negatives to create a single picture, introduced handwork into the photograph by scratching some of her negatives, and even included imperfections in her photographs.  Her aim was to record faithfully the ‘inner as well as the outer man’.[5] This commitment produced a dreamlike, ethereal quality to her portraits and an unprecedented psychological depth, which is evident in ‘The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty’ (fig 3), for which Sir John Herschel, Cameron’s mentor, applauded her: ‘she is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air’.[6]

                Fig 1: Beatrice, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866, Museum no. 944-1933 V&A Museum
Fig 2: Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869, Museum no. 932-1913 V&A Museum
Cameron categorised her work into three main groups: Portraits, Madonna Groups and Fancy Subjects. Whilst she was best known for her portraits, through her ‘Fancy Subjects’ she embraced allegorical storytelling, posing her sitters as characters from biblical, historical and literary stories.  Alongside Lewis Carroll and Oscar Gustave Rejlander, she was among the first to use allegory in photography and it was to be the focus of her work throughout her career. 
 Figure 3: The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, 1866, Museum no. 1047-2017, V&A Museum


[1] John Hannavy, Masters of Victorian Photography, (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1976) p. 70
[2] Quoted in John Hannavy, Masters of Victorian Photography, p. 68

Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865)

by Jessica Thomas

Lady Clementina Hawarden was a pioneering Victorian female photographer, working during the 1860s.  The daughter of Admiral Charles Elphinestone Fleeming and Catalina Paulina Alessandro, who was known as the ‘Exotic Beauty’, as she was from Cadiz and 26 years her husband’s junior.  Hawarden married and had ten children, eight of whom survived, and the subjects of her photographs are predominantly her daughters.  Very little is known about Hawarden as she did not keep a diary, and few of her letters remain.  Hawarden’s career was very short – a mere 7 years, as she died aged only 42, from a bout of pneumonia.  It was widely believed that her immune system was severely compromised from her constant exposure to the photographic chemicals.  Despite this brevity, Hawarden was admired by many, including Oscar Gustave Rejlander, critic and photographer and Lewis Carroll.  She was the first female photographer to receive critical recognition, creating technical perfect prints.
           Hawarden’s work records the life and interest of an upper-class, mid Victorian family, yet reveal little of this world.  Interestingly, however, the furniture and décor of the upper-class London home is removed from the room, creating mis-en-scene and theatrical poses within the first-floor studio of her home.  As a woman, she was forced to stay at home to work, unlike her male counterparts who would set off to explore far away places with their camera. However, she staked out new parameters of art and photography with her careful choice of props, clothing, mirrors, balcony and posture, she was able to create exquisite studies of her daughters.  The figures and their dress are the main subject matter, framed carefully in the room and often in front of the balcony, with the city beyond providing a blurred background.  The provocative poses of her daughters are significant as the Victorians were anxious about the idea of sexuality and adolescence, thus her photographs raise significant issues of gender, motherhood and sexuality, relating to the photographs’ attachments to loss, duplication, replication, illusion and fetish. 
         Hawarden, it has been suggested, was the first photographer to be obsessed with the way that fabric hangs off the female form, as can be seen below:
LCH006 Clementina Maude 1862-63 (2).
In this photograph, Hawarden has situated her daughter before the tall mirror, which served to provide natural light for the photograph.  Hawarden used light with lavishness and ambiguity, to generate the air of theatricality.  Clementina adopts a pose that gives the impression of being languorous or thoughtful, even though we know she would have had to hold this pose for several minutes while the plate was exposed.  She seems in a kind of pensive dream, with the rest of the world dim and distant behind her.  This pose is typical of the stances the models adopted Victorian maidens taking on the tragic postures of classical heroines.  
LCH003 Isabella Grace Maude 1862-63 (2)
This photograph was actually used by Penguin for the cover of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White which is really appropriate, as there is an air of loneliness and mystery about it, which was characteristic of Hawarden’s work.  Isabella is positioned before a mirror, which was a favourite prop of Hawarden’s.  Mirrors are always mysterious and lightly threatening, suggesting the double and doppelganger.  Once again, this study considers how the fabric drapes over the feminine form. In addition to the mirror and window props, Hawarden was passionate about clothing and fabric, her daughters often dressed up in Bohemian fancy dress.
LCH002 Clementina Maude 1862-63

Once again, the mirror is used, Clementina’s reflection barely visible, she becomes timeless and you could be looking at a young woman created at any time, an air of modernity.  The pose of Clementina is a sort of casual awkwardness, with an enigmatic stare, the shadowy light from the mirror creating an atmosphere of mystery. On either side of the mirror is another world.  Suggestions have been raised that Hawarden’s photographs inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass.  There is a sense of intimacy in this picture, a trust between model and photographer, which would have only been possible between a mother and daughter.  Clementina is in a reverie, Hawarden’s photograph capturing this, communicating the private passions and glimpses of adolescent girls, left to their own devices, and thriving upon it.  

Maxime du Camp (1822-1894)
by Nicola Lloyd
Maxime Du Camp was a Frenchman known for photographing North Africa and the Middle East, often travelling with the writer, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Du Camp’s travels in 1849 with Flaubert were recorded in Flaubert’s book on Egypt, which has been considered something between a travel guide and a travelogue. Du Camp’s photographs often depicted monuments and remarkable desert landscapes. Before the invention of photography there would have only been sketches and paintings of such scenes.
Stele of Kernak, Egypt (c. 1850)
Time-Life International, Die Photographie, Große Photographen, 1973, Page 38, ISBN 90-618-2015-4
            Du Camp was trained in the Blanqaurt-Evrard process of photography and of the photos he took some were printed in his book titled Egypt, Nubie, Palestine and Syria (1852).
Camille Silvy (1834-1910)
by Kimberley Hoar
Camille Silvy was a French photographer born in 1834, who spent a lot of time working in London. He began working with landscapes, and was praised for his attention to light and detail. River Scene, France, shows a fascinating use of perspective and light, using the rule of thirds to capture the river so beautifully, and masterfully balancing light against dark.
River Scene, France (1869)
While his photography originally focused on the countryside near Paris, he later became an expert producing the cartes de visite, which were very small photographs, usually of people. He worked under Queen Victoria, and photographed members of the British royal family.


James Pinson Labulo Davies; Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Sarah Davies)
5 September 1862


One of his subjects was Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a West African Princess (originally called Aina), who was orphaned and sold into slavery, before being given to Queen Victoria by Captain Frederick Forbes. Although Sarah was not part of Queen Victoria’s household, they shared a close relationship, and the Queen paid to look after Sarah. There are four known photographs of Sarah taken by Camille Silvy, two of herself alone, and two with her husband. She is photographed as a typical Victorian lady, and stands in dignified poses that suggest her class and nobility. Black people were rarely represented like this in Victoria's England, but Sarah held an interesting position as both West African nobility, and a person of interest to Queen Victoria. Through her Western dress she has been made somewhat acceptable to Victorian British society. 


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