Vanishing into light: the “literary photographs” of Julia Margaret Cameron and the figuration of ephemerality

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

The author is deeply grateful to Lucy Hartley, Daniel Hack, and Elana Maloul for their feedback on the early drafts of this article.

Notes

1 Here, Williams references photography in general, though it appears that even Cameron’s contemporaries recognized this “potential suddenly to move” as a distinct marker of Cameron’s stylistic. In a letter written on September 25, 1866, Herschel tells Cameron that “the head of the ‘Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty’ … is really a most astonishing piece of high relief. She is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air. This is your own special style” (as quoted in Ford 1975, 142).

2 Whereas Armstrong suggests that “the photograph is the literalization of the photographer’s imagination, and that the tableau-vivant, when photographed, is a first-person experience – the homemade stamp on Cameron's photographs and on the playacting depicted in them” (1996, 131), I suggest that, for Cameron, the “literalization of the photographer’s imagination” was not altogether a first-person experience, but rather, a discursive exchange between actors and manager, models and photographer.

3 If Cameron’s literary photographs from the Isle of Wight are an example of photographic “homemaking” as Carol Armstrong intimates (1996, 130), then Cameron’s images from Ceylon offer a counterexample of expatriating.

4 The other reference appears in chapter five: “But to a mind of general benevolence, wishing everybody to look well, it was rather exasperating to see how Gwendolen eclipsed others: how even the handsome Miss Lawe, explained to be the daughter of Lady Lawe, looked suddenly broad, heavy and inanimate; and how Miss Arrowpoint, unfortunately also dressed in white, immediately resembled a carte-de-visite in which one would fancy the skirt alone to have been charged for” (Eliot 1876, 1:72).

5 I maintain that Eliot’s critical tone is not directed at the genre of literary photographs, or, photographs which represent literary scenes, but with literature “called literary photographs,” marking an impossible mimetic conundrum in which literature is described as representing a photographic representation of itself.

6 “Alfred Tennyson walked into my room saying ‘Will you think it a trouble to illuminate my “Idylls” for me?’ I answered laughing ‘Now you know Alfred that I know that is immortality to me to be bound up with you that altho’ I bully you I have a corner of worship for you in my heart.’ – and so I consented” see Cameron (1874a).

7 In the words of Roland Barthes, “however ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it … Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (1980, 76). In other words, Cameron’s theatrical tableau of “The Passing of Arthur” is simultaneously fixed and fading, motionless and moving, present and already past.

8 Anne Thackeray Ritchie writes in her recollections, “The coffee crop had failed in Ceylon several years and money difficulties became very serious for the Camerons. Photography might have paid better if the photographer had been less lavish in her gifts and ways” (1919, 27).

9 At the time in which the Camerons made their final journey to Ceylon, the Suez Canal had only recently opened (in 1869), significantly reducing the distance between England and its colonies in the East; moreover, Benjamin Disraeli was on the verge of purchasing all of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal for Great Britain.

10 For more on the colonial context of Eliot’s fiction, and Eliot’s sentiments on exile, see Nancy Henry’s George Eliot and the British Empire (2002). Henry writes, for example, that “It is possible that the lament over Gwendolen’s lack of some ‘spot of native land’ may have been intensified by Eliot’s observation of the rootless and ultimately exiled lives” of her sons, Thornie and Bertie, who emigrated to South Africa in the 1860s (2002, 59).

11 Said makes a compelling argument for the background of Zionism in nineteenth-century European colonialist attitudes, revealing the consequences for such narrative and rhetorical practices, particularly with regard for the victims of colonial settlement. As settlers appease their “need for a home,” they overwhelmingly perpetuate conditions of homelessness by disrupting and displacing native populations.

12 Ironically, global transportation, the very method of connecting what Cameron calls the “mighty whole,” was directly to blame.

13 Some would “feign sickness, as planters were obliged by law to feed their sick workers” while others would “return to the lines after the six am muster on a pretext of having forgotten something, and then to hide there for the rest of the day.” Their evasion, however, extended to the fields where they used “their superior knowledge of the landscape to their advantage,” hiding behind trees and bushes or “slip[ping] into the jungle at the edge of the plantation for short naps.” When work was unavoidable, laborers would find ways to “lighten their loads by cutting open and pouring out a small portion of coffee or rice from heavy bags.” And, when quotas were enforced, laborers would pretend to meet their daily quota by stealing coffee from the stores at night and using it to fill their bags the next day. See Duncan (2007, 90) and Kurian (2003).

14 “She also made some studies of natives while I was there, and took such a fancy to the back of one of them (which she said was absolutely superb) that she insisted on her son retaining him as her gardener, though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word.” See North (1892, 315).

15 “If the planter searched the lines he often found it difficult to see workers hiding in the dark, smoky interiors. The darkness and smoke gave the worker time to scale the partitions between the rooms in a line and return to the fields” (Duncan 2007, 90).

16 Leila Anne Harris suggests that Cameron’s photographs can understood as “metaphors of Empire” that speak to Cameron’s colonial sentiments of “ideal plantation workers” (2021, 11). While I agree that these photographs can be understood as “metaphors of Empire,” I do not read these photographs as representing “ideal plantation workers.” Indeed, none of Cameron’s photographs are representative of coffee plantation labor.

17 Harris suggests that “perhaps the true failing of her later pictures is their inability to match expectations for her work, and one of those key expectations is the presentation of white European bodies” (2021, 13). I argue, however, that the “failure” of her later pictures was not in “their inability to match expectations,” but in Cameron’s unsuccessful attempt to continue what may be called her domesticating practice of using home theatricals to transform individuals into characters. Indeed, the missing component in Cameron’s photographs from Ceylon is the private, domestic stage. A vast majority of the photographs from Ceylon are either taken from her veranda, in the fields, or against an exterior structure. Thus, the intimate, domestic space is supplanted by the expansive and public exterior of the plantation where visuality could not be policed and identities could not be transformed.

18 Cameron’s titles, if any, are included in quotations. Brackets demarcate untitled works that were given descriptive titles by their collectors.

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Ani Bezirdzhyan

Ani Bezirdzhyan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on representations of class, race, gender, and empire in Victorian literature and visual culture. She is currently completing a dissertation titled “Victorian Media Re-Viewed: Literature and the Politics of Visual Representation in Britain, 1839–1879.”