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As the popularity of spirit photography attested, the emergence of genre photography in the nineteenth century provided a mode of visual production for the maternal gaze to consume and (re)produce images of dead children which Gothicised and maternalised the photographic process and the paternal household. Gothic practices of spirit photography and memorial portraiture penetrated the home and inspired the domestic amateur photographer, an influence apparent in the work of Julia Margaret Cameron. The 1839 race between rivals Fox Talbot and Daguerre to be the first to develop a photographic process has characterised the conception of photography, but the science was not an exclusively male preserve. French photographer Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils was the first women to practice professionally in the Middle East, establishing with her husband Félix in 1867 the Maison Bonfils studio in Beirut, and Scottish scientist and mathematician Mary Somerville developed a plant-based form of photography known as the anthotype which used the photosensitive material in plants to create an image. Being a woman Somerville was not permitted to publish her theories with the Royal Society (Patricia Fara 2018, 285), and presented this research to Sir John Herschel who published it on her behalf in Philosophical Transactions (1842), and so inevitably Herschel is sometimes miscredited as the inventor. English botanical artist and photographer Anna Atkins self-published Photographs of British and Foreign Algae (1843–1853), twelve volumes containing almost spectral cyanotypes of botanical samples, considered to be the first book published on photography. Pioneering a method invented by Herschel, Atkins’ process created prints of shadows of marine algae and plants on photosensitised paper exposed to the sun, as Lindsay Smith observes another example of photographic imprints which ‘focus the agency of photography as searing the surface of the support and […] have the capacity to frustrate notions of photography as primarily a pictorial medium’ (2020, 16).

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‘Taken from Life’: Memorial Portraiture, Divine Death, and the Virgin Mary in the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Sara Williams

摘要

As the popularity of spirit photography attested, the emergence of genre photography in the nineteenth century provided a mode of visual production for the maternal gaze to consume and (re)produce images of dead children which Gothicised and maternalised the photographic process and the paternal household. Gothic practices of spirit photography and memorial portraiture penetrated the home and inspired the domestic amateur photographer, an influence apparent in the work of Julia Margaret Cameron. The 1839 race between rivals Fox Talbot and Daguerre to be the first to develop a photographic process has characterised the conception of photography, but the science was not an exclusively male preserve. French photographer Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils was the first women to practice professionally in the Middle East, establishing with her husband Félix in 1867 the Maison Bonfils studio in Beirut, and Scottish scientist and mathematician Mary Somerville developed a plant-based form of photography known as the anthotype which used the photosensitive material in plants to create an image. Being a woman Somerville was not permitted to publish her theories with the Royal Society (Patricia Fara 2018, 285), and presented this research to Sir John Herschel who published it on her behalf in Philosophical Transactions (1842), and so inevitably Herschel is sometimes miscredited as the inventor. English botanical artist and photographer Anna Atkins self-published Photographs of British and Foreign Algae (1843–1853), twelve volumes containing almost spectral cyanotypes of botanical samples, considered to be the first book published on photography. Pioneering a method invented by Herschel, Atkins’ process created prints of shadows of marine algae and plants on photosensitised paper exposed to the sun, as Lindsay Smith observes another example of photographic imprints which ‘focus the agency of photography as searing the surface of the support and […] have the capacity to frustrate notions of photography as primarily a pictorial medium’ (2020, 16).