Julia Margaret Cameron (Born 1815) was born in Calcutta, India. She died in Sri Lanka (formerly Kalutara, Ceylon) in 1879. Her original name is Julia Margaret Pattle. She was a renowned photographer in Britain and was considered to be one of the top portrait photographers of the 19th century. Julia was the daughter of an East India Company officer, and she married Charles Hay Cameron, who was a jurist. The couple had 6 children, and the family decided to settle on the Isle of Wight in 1860. She started her photography career in 1863 after receiving a camera as a gift. She decided to convert her chicken coop into a home studio. She used a coal bin as her darkroom and embarked on making portraits. Among her models were her friends the astronomer Sir Herschel John, the poets Henry Longfellow Wadsworth and Lord Alfred Tennyson, the scientist Charles Darwin and the writer Thomas Carlyle.
Especially worth noting from this period are her very insightful representations of female beauty, as in her portraits of Julia Jackson and the actress Ellen Terry; the former was her niece, who, one day, became the mother of the writer Woolf Virginia. Like many photographers of her time, she made illustrative and allegorical studio photographs, costuming and posing servants and family members in imitation of the popular Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic paintings of that time. She was often criticized by the established photographers of her day for her technique which was supposedly poor: they said some of her pictures were out of focus, and that her plates were sometimes cracked.
