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A Beautiful Monograph Illuminating the Iconic Portraits of One of Nineteenth Century's Influential Artistic Photographers.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) was forty-eight when her daughter gave her a camera as a gift. Even though her self-taught career started late she is considered an ambitious pioneer of the art of photography. Producing some of the most innovative and visually striking portraits of her time, Cameron has left behind an unprecedented archive of the leaders and intellectuals of Victorian England, including Alfred Tennyson, Holsman Hunt, and Charles Darwin.

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON by Joanne Lukitsh, is an illustrated overview of the work of this legendary photographer. This affordable book documents the development of her photography through a chronological sequence of 55 black and white images. The accompanying text by Boston-based Professor Lukitsh provides a fresh perspective on her life and work, placing her within the cultural context of her time and within the history of photojournalism.

Cameron's artistic context for her photographs was her vital social circle of painters, writers, critics and intellectuals. Her images are often the only existing photographs of these influential historical individuals. In addition her work encompassed tender portraits of children and wistful, poetic homages to female beauty.

Cameron's sophisticated use of lighting and selective focus displayed her passion for beauty, literature and, myth. In addition to literature, she drew inspiration from the old masters. She stated her photographic mission as: "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty." Flipping through the pages of this beautiful monograph it is immediately apparent that Cameron not only accomplished her mission, but ultimately transformed the face of portraiture.

• Phaidon 55