Snapshot: What Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photography Reveals about the Gender Ideologies of 19th Century Britain

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was an audacious British photographer at a turning point in art and gender history. It was only in the last fifteen years of her life that Cameron received a rudimentary camera and set her artistic career into motion. Her photographs document the lives of many well-known people of her time, but her images simultaneously serve as statements of the gender attitudes present during her lifetime and epitomize the contradictions of the woman artist in the Victorian era. By analyzing the subject matter that is portrayed within her images in the context of the age in which she lived, the formal elements of her art, and Cameron\u27s own class background, it becomes clear that Cameron\u27s graphic work is a representation of the role of women in the late nineteenth century and Cameron\u27s own struggle to reconcile her art and gender identity