According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s great-nieces, “we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.” This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815–1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than twelve hundred images during a fourteen-year career. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her own art though exhibition and sale, and pursuing the eminent personalities of her age—Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, and others—as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné.

In addition to a complete catalogue of Cameron’s photographs, there is information on her life and times, initial experiments, artistic aspirations, techniques, small-format images, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of inspiration. Also provided are a selected bibliography of publications on Cameron, a list of exhibitions of her work held both in her time as well as our own, and a summary of important collections where her pictures can be found.

• Foreword
  Deborah Gribbon
• Preface
  Weston Naef
• Acknowledgments
  Julian Cox and Colin Ford
• Introduction
  Julian Cox and Colin Ford
• Chronology
• Geniuses, Poets, and Painters: The World of Julia Margaret Cameron
  Colin Ford
• “To … startle the eye with wonder & delight”: The Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron
  Julian Cox
• Little Pictures: Julia Margaret Cameron and Small-Format Photography
  Philippa Wright
• Before 1864: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Early Work in Photography
  Joanne Lukitsh
• CATALOGUE
  • Note to the Reader
  • Collection Abbreviations
  • I. Beginnings
  • II. Religion
  • III. Women
  • IV. Men
  • V. Children
  • VI. Illustrations
  • VII. Idylls
  • VIII. Ceylon
• Appendix A: Copyright Registers
• Appendix B: Inscriptions, Stamps, and the Business of Photography
• Appendix C: Albums
• Appendix D: Collections
• Appendix E: Sitters
• Appendix F: Sources of Inspiration
• Selected References
• Selected Exhibitions
• Title Index
• General Index
• Photography Credits

Julian Cox is assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Colin Ford is former head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England, and former director of the National Museums of Wales.