Victorian-era, Calcutta-born photographer Cameron was well traveled and well connected; steeped in religion, literature, art, and science; and a wife and mother of six in her forties when she began taking photographs at a furious pace after her family settled in England. She photographed the famous and the unknown with equal respect and lyricism, especially women and children (including her niece, Julia Jackson, Virginia Woolf's beautiful mother, and Alice Liddell, for whom Charles Dodgson wrote Alice in Wonderland), creating the dramatic vignettes and portraits so gloriously reproduced and documented in this monumental retrospective volume. Cox, assistant curator of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Ford, head of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, consider Cameron's "single-minded intensity and idealism" in detailed and animated discussions of her astonishing oeuvre of more than 1,200 ravishing images. Combining aesthetic, technical, and biographical elements in their meticulously researched discussion of her success in mastering a devilishly difficult new medium and overcoming gender-related obstacles to become an artist of enduring significance, they thoroughly and ardently chronicle every aspect of Cameron's extraordinary life, art, and legacy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved