Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron was given a camera at 48 and broke every rule of Victorian studio practice: soft focus, long exposures that let sitters move, heads cropped tight and lit from one side in her converted henhouse on the Isle of Wight. Her portraits of Tennyson, Darwin and Julia Jackson, and her staged allegories with maids and neighbours in costume, share that dreamy, close intensity. The servants and family members who posed again and again, among them Mary Hillier, were central to the work, and so were the smudges, cracks and fingerprints she left on her wet-collodion glass negatives.