A. Fictional Photography: Julia Margaret Cameron's Camelot

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Kiss of Peace, 1869.

One of the geniuses of "fictional photography," as I like to call it, was the British photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. She was born in India, but spent most of her adult life living with her husband and six children on the Isle of Wight. She was exceptionally well-connected with the prominent artists and writers of her age. Her next-door-neighbor was the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Cameron made her first photographs in 1863 at the age of 48, when her children gave her a camera to brighten her spirits after the last one left the nest. She threw herself into photography with tremendous zeal, making and exhibiting photographic portraits of famous artists and men of letters.

Her photographs were marked by an unusual style: the center of the photograph was usually in sharp focus, while clarity would be lost toward the edges. Initially this was the result of lens problems that she did not know how to avert, but she liked the look and made it her mark. Critics either loved it or hated it, depending on whether they expected photographs to be crisp and clear or not. Cameron wrote in a letter in 1864, "I believe in other than mere conventional photography-map making and skeleton rendering of feature and form without that roundness and fullness of face and feature, that modeling of flesh and limb, which the focus I use only can give." In that same year a critic for the Athenaeum described her work as "dreadfully opposed to photographic conventionalities and proprieties. They are the more valuable for being so."