This essay examines how Julia Margaret Cameron created her domestic artistry with her album-making at home. Many critics undervalue the artistic value of Cameron’s photographic album, the Overstone Album, as woman’s domestic interest. However, this essay argues that this album was not just a homemade gift by the stereotyped Victorian woman, but an ambitious visual project by the first Victorian female photographic illustrator who transgressed the limited conventions of gender ideology in the masculine Victorian art world. The essay first investigates how Cameron utilized her home, Dimbola, as a breeding place for her unconventional photographic world. It then turns to explore Cameron’s radical visual scenarios represented in her photographs, St. Agnes and Magdalene, based on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “St. Agnes’ Eve” and “Maud” to argue her revolutionary attempt to challenge the photographic technique and conventional Victorian gender paradigm. Although Cameron’s Overstone Album was a cultural production, this essay argues that the aesthetic value of this album was more than this. It was Cameron’s artistic transgression of the limits of conventions through the most feminized domestic photographs.
1. Introduction
2. Cameron’s transgressive photo making
3. Conclusion
Works Cited