Julia Margaret Cameron. Hurdy-Gurdy Man , ca. 1863. 78 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations JORDAN BEAR Sketching the rudiments of what would become a surprisingly durable origin story of her photographic production, Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in 1874 of her breakthrough more than a decade earlier, casting herself as a naive, if not accidental, initiate into the medium: I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. I got my first picture, and this was the one I effaced when holding it triumphantly to dry. 1 The obliteration of the photographic image by the novice technique of this presumably self-taught woman was hardly the most consequen - tial effacement to occur in this particular mythology. Although Cameron cultivated this autodidactic persona throughout her life, her “first success” in 1864, the treasured portrait of local girl Annie Philpot, was not the irruptive revolution Cameron’s account would seem to suggest. What this anecdote wipes from view is the course of training Cameron had undertaken in the preceding year from the phenomenally successful commercial photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, as well as the startling photographs that emerged from this period of instruction and collaboration. The ambivalent tension between the effacement and assertion of her photographic agency is complicated further by the peculiar constellation of identities involved in the collaboration between an amateur woman and a professional man. Cameron’s recollection of her initial triumph deletes this alliance from the historical record, yet it was paradoxically in a series of procedures of effacing herself that Cameron was to negotiate the question of her gender in the production of photographic agency, by seeming to absent herself from the image or to defer to the expertise of her male tutor, only to return in terms that seemed to destabilize the very possibility of such an absence, of a photograph without an author. Gender was, in this unique collaboration, the category through Grey Room 48, Summer 2012, pp. 78–101. © 2012 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 which photographic neutrality was aggressively interrogated and in which the mythologies of femininity and transparency might be consolidated and engaged. Cameron and Rejlander probably first met when the latter traveled to the Isle of Wight to photograph Cameron’s closest neighbor and England’s most beloved poet, Alfred Tennyson, in 1863. 2 The intellectual com - munity on the island was close-knit, and the arrival of one of London’s most discussed photographers might easily have induced Cameron to plan one of her seemingly innumerable salons at her country estate, Dimbola. Whatever the source of their initial encounter, the two were presently to collaborate on a number of photographs that indicate, from the start, the pair’s unconventional, charged interaction. Although Rejlander and Cameron’s relationship has traditionally been character - ized as that of mentor and protégée, more recent scholarship has noted the likelihood that the relationship was in fact one of employer and employee, with the socially superior Cameron engaging the services of the commercial photographer Rejlander. 3 The noted photographer P.H. Emerson published a hagiography of Cameron’s life and work in 1890 in consultation with one of Cameron’s surviving sons. Emerson asserts, Long before that memorable day in 1864, on which little Miss Philpot was conjured as with a magician’s wand upon a glass plate covered with a chemical film. Mrs. Cameron had spent hundreds of pounds in paying the degraders of the art to fix the faces of her friends. Her generous nature did not consider money, photographers were ordered with lavishness to work for her, often under her immediate supervision. The best of this vicari - ous photography was Rejlander’s portrait of Tennyson. 4 If, as this passage suggests, Rejlander was one of those “degraders” whose services Cameron procured, then a reconsideration of the conse - quences of this “vicarious photography” and the account of authorship and agency it implies is imperative. Viewing their relationship in this manner makes a group of collaborative pictures from 1863 much more intriguing. Two photographs of similar composition depict the arrival of tradesmen at the back door to Dimbola: The Butcher’s Visit and Receiving the Post . The interaction between the utopia of the Cameron estate and the outside world is mediated through these exchanges—even par - adise needs its meat and its mail. Yet, the pro - nounced class dimensions of these photographs 80 Grey Room 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 are difficult to overlook, the butcher and postman dressed in their work clothes and negotiating with the staff at the servant’s entrance. Another photograph executed in a similar vein, The Hurdy-Gurdy Man , depicts the itinerant entertainer playing his music box for the benefit of the four women encircling him. However, this installment in the series differs crucially from the previous two, because the man in question is Rejlander himself, cranking away to the delight of the maidens. The association between the tradesmen, bringing to Dimbola the necessities of the outside world, and Rejlander, who comes to pro - vide pleasure through the performance of a mechanical device, indi - cates that the stakes of this “vicarious photography” were far more problematic than the romanticized teacher and student dynamic often attributed to these two figures. That Rejlander would appear in front of the camera manipulating one mechanical tool while Cameron stood behind it, employing another, proposes a complex account of the agency of the photographer that would be articulated in the most con - tested product of this uneasy association. This sojourn was likely when Rejlander produced a photograph of Kate Dore, a local peasant girl, depicting her in a bust-length portrait in profile. 5 This image reemerges in a photograph that is perhaps the most emblematic of the complexities of the Rejlander-Cameron collabo - rations: the image provisionally entitled Kate Dore with Frame of Plant Opposite: Julia Margaret Forms is a most curious kind of dual effort. The object is in fact a pho - Cameron. Receiving the Post , togram, a cameraless picture, which Cameron produced by encasing ca. 1863. Rejlander’s earlier portrait within a frame of ferns placed directly onto Below: Julia Margaret the photographic paper and exposed to light. This use of the photogram Cameron, possibly with O.G. Rejlander. The Butcher’s Visit , technique does not recur in Cameron’s corpus, and its deployment here ca. 1863. suggests that it held a particularly attractive set of associations for Cameron. Initially, the photogram seems to be a deferential production because it reproduces Rejlander’s photograph without overt revision of the portrait itself. Cameron’s contribution seems relegated to one of embellishment because she has added only a decorative frame to the original image. Moreover, the embellishment is one that has appeared through a technique that seems to obviate the presence of an author, in which the natural flora appears as if by organic growth, hav - ing physically touched the photosensitive paper. Yet, this deferral or absence is strategically feigned, shot through with an acute awareness of the peculiarities of being a woman and a photog - rapher in the first decades of the medium, and of the specific history of that ambivalent identity. Bear | The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00081 by guest on 26 September 2021 Photography Sub Rosa If Cameron’s aim was deference in the execution of a merely repro - ductive and decorative reiteration of Rejlander’s original work, it was enacted in a way that is strikingly marked by the conjunction of the questions of gender and objectivity that attended early photography. The presence of the ferns in Cameron’s photogram was, by the early 1860s, readily associated with a particularly female kind of contribu - tion to the flowering of the medium. The celebrated cyanotypes of Anna Atkins created over an eleven-year period in the 1840s and 1850s had culminated in two albums dedicated not to the algae with which she has since been associated but to Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (1853). Atkins’s work was, as Carol Armstrong argues, a project in which the limitations of Atkins’s gender in producing a work of positivist taxonomy that might be widely accepted by ortho - dox science empowered her to reexamine the more fundamental ques - tions of the photograph’s suitability to this enterprise. Atkins “wandered into a photographic and scientific cul-de-sac, and liking it Below: O.G. Rejlander. there, stayed to entertain herself by problematizing the system of Kate Dore , ca. 1862. Library of positivist classification and the apparatus of the illustration,” an Congress. undertaking “possible only at the outer limits of the patriarchal con - Opposite, top: Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes of British and 6 duct of normal science.” The title page of this volume, itself a cyan - Foreign Ferns , ca. 1853. otype, shows Atkins’s hand lettering enframed by the very ferns that Title page. are to be the subject of her study. The script of the title rhymes visu - Opposite, bottom: ally with the structure of the ferns, eliding Atkins’s subjective pres - O.G.