Volume 46, Number 2 · February 4, 1999
The Genius of the Glass House
By Janet Malcolm
Julia Margaret Cameron's Women 1998-January 10, 1999; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 27-May 24, 1999; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 27-November 30, 1999.
an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 19,, Catalog of the exhibition by Sylvia Wolf, by others
The Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 243 pp., $49.95
In a short essay in the voluminous catalog that accompanies the exhibition 'Julia Margaret Cameron's Women,' Phyllis Rose notes that 'Cameron's women do not smile. Their poses embody sorrow, resignation, composure, solemnity, and love, determined love, love which will have a hard time of it.' Rose goes on to write of the illness, disaster, and defeat that perpetually hovered over the lives of Victorian women. But there were causes closer to hand for the tragic address of Cameron's women. Cameron used a photo-graphic apparatus—fifteen- by twelve-inch glass plates and a lens of thirty-inch focal length—that required exposures of between three and ten minutes. Here is an account of a sitting by one of the unsmiling women, quoted by Helmut Gernsheim in his book Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (1948 and 1974):
Review, 5090 words
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