For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron
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The Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron assembled photographic albums as invitations to friends and family to join her in her artistic aspirations. The majority of these albums, including the Herschel, Overstone and Watts Albums, were presentation albums she gave to powerful and influential people to secure moral and creative support. Of fewer number are Cameron's family albums which, in contrast to her more public-oriented presentation albums, are poignantly intimate in their familial character. In these unique collections, relatives collaborated with Cameron in compiling private accounts of family heritage, life, social status and personal pursuits.
On July 7, 1863, Cameron presented as a gift to her sister Maria (Mia) Jackson a partially-filled photographic album, bound in rich green leather. The date of the Mia Album is telling, for it coincides with the nascent phase of Cameron's photographic activities. |
Although separated by time and distance, the two sisters collaborated in the album's assembly over the course of a decade. Ostensibly, the album stands as a record of the sisters' immediate and extended family, Cameron's social and artistic circle,and the surroundings of her home Dimbola, at Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight.
But more importantly, it demonstrates how photographs, viewed here either individually or collectively, intertwine reality and illusion, fostering the sisters' own mythic conception of family life and its traditions. Like any album or heirloom, the Mia Album was conceived to transcend its own time, to assume a place in the hands and minds of succeeding generations.
-- Therese Mulligan, from the Foreword to the catalog for the original exhibition
Thus, alone among Cameron's presentation albums, the Mia Album fulfills several distinct functions in Cameron's oeuvre: it is not only a family album, but also a multi-year exposition of Cameron's evolving career. As the former, it features a wealth of portraits of Mia's beautiful daughter Julia Duckworth (the mother of Virginia Woolf), several of them unique, as well as of Cameron's daughter-in-law Annie Chinery. As the latter, the pictures range from Cameron's earliest camera successes (the charming Annie Philpot, from January 1864), to her late mature work, such as The Dream and The Kiss of Peace, both from 1869. It is also rich in the work of Cameron's contemporaries, including Lewis Carroll, and especially Oscar Rejlander, who from all evidence emerges as Cameron's most important early mentor.
The Mia Album has been the subject of two independent publications. After a highly acclaimed museum tour in the mid-1990s, it is now available for a few select engagements.
Number of photographs: 70
Frame sizes: 20 x 24 inches
Linear feet: 260
Rental fee: $25,000 for 8 weeks
The following publications are available;Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, by Julian Cox .
Published by J. Paul Getty Trust Publications 2003
Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work, by Helmut Gernsheim.
Published by Aperture 1975
Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, by Sylvia Wolf.
Published by Yale University Press, 1998
The following two catalogues are out of print, but high quality used copies are available;
A Victorian Album: Julia Margaret Cameron and Her Circle, by Graham Ovenden.
Published by Da Capo, 1975
For My Best Beloved Sister Mia : An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.
Published by University of New Mexico Art Museum 1994
But more importantly, it demonstrates how photographs, viewed here either individually or collectively, intertwine reality and illusion, fostering the sisters' own mythic conception of family life and its traditions. Like any album or heirloom, the Mia Album was conceived to transcend its own time, to assume a place in the hands and minds of succeeding generations.
-- Therese Mulligan, from the Foreword to the catalog for the original exhibition
Thus, alone among Cameron's presentation albums, the Mia Album fulfills several distinct functions in Cameron's oeuvre: it is not only a family album, but also a multi-year exposition of Cameron's evolving career. As the former, it features a wealth of portraits of Mia's beautiful daughter Julia Duckworth (the mother of Virginia Woolf), several of them unique, as well as of Cameron's daughter-in-law Annie Chinery. As the latter, the pictures range from Cameron's earliest camera successes (the charming Annie Philpot, from January 1864), to her late mature work, such as The Dream and The Kiss of Peace, both from 1869. It is also rich in the work of Cameron's contemporaries, including Lewis Carroll, and especially Oscar Rejlander, who from all evidence emerges as Cameron's most important early mentor.
The Mia Album has been the subject of two independent publications. After a highly acclaimed museum tour in the mid-1990s, it is now available for a few select engagements.
Number of photographs: 70
Frame sizes: 20 x 24 inches
Linear feet: 260
Rental fee: $25,000 for 8 weeks
The following publications are available;Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, by Julian Cox .
Published by J. Paul Getty Trust Publications 2003
Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work, by Helmut Gernsheim.
Published by Aperture 1975
Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, by Sylvia Wolf.
Published by Yale University Press, 1998
The following two catalogues are out of print, but high quality used copies are available;
A Victorian Album: Julia Margaret Cameron and Her Circle, by Graham Ovenden.
Published by Da Capo, 1975
For My Best Beloved Sister Mia : An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.
Published by University of New Mexico Art Museum 1994