Penultimatum

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The daughter of a French mother and an English father, Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815 and is one of the world's most renowned photographers. In 1848, she moved to England, where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles they frequented.

She was almost 50 when she acquired her first camera, and in just a decade, she created thousands of photographs that left a striking image of the Victorian era. She also established a style of spontaneous intimacy in her work that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and the class to which she belonged.

She is the subject of portraits of the most prominent English writers, artists and scientists, such as Thomas Carlyle, GF Watts, Charles Darwin and the poet Alfred Tennyson, who invited her to illustrate his collection of poems Idylls of the King with a series of photographs.

Critics highlight how Julia Margaret's portraits transformed her subjects into enigmatic, reserved, thoughtful, and distant figures. Very lyrical. Absent, bucolic .

Along with portraits, her fascination with the fine arts stands out, particularly Renaissance painting, which led her to create scenographic paintings that are still studied today. She also exhibited a series of Madonnas, inspired by the Renaissance, and a group of allegorical and narrative photographs for which she chose paintings by Raphael and Michelangelo as sources of inspiration.

This century his work has been exhibited in London, Madrid and New York, where the Morgan Library now presents Captivating Beauty , a selection of works from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which has the most comprehensive collection of his work in the world: almost a thousand photographs, thanks to which it is possible to explore the innovative career of this great figure of photography.

The exhibition also includes the large lens of Cameron's camera (the only surviving part of his device), pages from the unfinished manuscript of his memoirs, Annals of My Glass House , and portraits he took in Sri Lanka, where he died in 1879.

She made her ideal effective: to ennoble photography, giving it the tenor and uses of the Fine Arts.