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Advanced 5 - Britanico Gold - Reading Task - Apr 2023: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879)

Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering female photographer in Victorian England who developed her own style of portraiture with soft focus and dramatic lighting. Her portraits of famous people and characters from mythology were highly regarded by her family and the art world at the time. However, the photography establishment was critical of her unconventional techniques. It took over a century for her work to be more widely recognized as masterpieces from that era.

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Yaquelin Ocaña Mas
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47 views

Advanced 5 - Britanico Gold - Reading Task - Apr 2023: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879)

Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering female photographer in Victorian England who developed her own style of portraiture with soft focus and dramatic lighting. Her portraits of famous people and characters from mythology were highly regarded by her family and the art world at the time. However, the photography establishment was critical of her unconventional techniques. It took over a century for her work to be more widely recognized as masterpieces from that era.

Uploaded by

Yaquelin Ocaña Mas
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ADVANCED 5 – BRITANICO GOLD – READING TASK – APR 2023

You are going to read a short article. Five sentences have been removed from the text. Choose
from the sentences A-F the one which fits each gap (31-35). There is an extra sentence you do
not need to use.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815—1879)


In the mid-Victorian age, Julia Margaret Cameron was regarded as a curiosity. Photography was in its
infancy and photographers were, with few exceptions, male and either frustrated painters or scientists
obsessed with the details of their new discipline. 31. ________ . Nevertheless, she showed more talent
than many of her male contemporaries and still holds the record for the highest auction price paid for a
single 19th-century British photograph (£147,000 in 2001).
Her own special style, full of light and shade and slightly out of focus, started, she modestly claimed,
as a ‘fluke’. As she explained: ‘When I was focusing one day, I came across something which, to my
eye, was very beautiful, so I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus
which all the other photographers insist upon.’ The photographic establishment was quick to find fault.
The Journal of the London Photographic Society expressed its disapproval. ‘As one of the special
charms of photography consists in the completeness, detail and finish, we can scarcely commend works
in which the aim appears to have been to avoid these qualities’.
Cameron, however, persevered with her way of capturing images. She took portraits of many famous
people of her time and also liked to photograph people dressed to represent characters in myths and
other well-known stories. She convinced her family, neighbours, acquaintances and servants to take
roles as Greek gods and goddesses. 32. _______ . People touring the area would make a special trip
to see Cameron at work in her studio.
Cameron’s passion for photography arose out of her family circumstances.33. ________. In 1838, she
married Charles Cameron, a prominent lawyer and administrator, twenty years her senior, and for nearly
a decade the Camerons lived overseas. In 1848, they moved back to England, but Charles travelled a
lot and, as her six children grew up and left home, Cameron combatted loneliness with photography.
Besides, she had never seen herself as a traditional home-keeper.
Cameron’s neighbour was the famous poet Tennyson and, at her own expense, she produced an
edition of his book of poems Idylls of the King, which she illustrated with her photos. The poems are
about the legendary King Arthur and his brave knights who fought to protect the weak and the innocent
and, in the accompanying photos, these characters have a heroic beauty. Servants and simple villagers
played the king, his queen and the noblemen of the poems.34. _________

When the first Dictionary of National Biography was put together in the 1890s, Julia Margaret Cameron
was the only photographer in its pages, and one of only eighteen women in its 420 entries. That she
was featured at all has much to do with the fact that the editor, Leslie Stephen, was married to her
favourite niece. But, despite his help, Cameron’s reputation didn’t immediately survive her.
35. _________. However, the photography world was less certain and almost a century passed before
it changed its mind.

A. Her surviving prints are now considered masterpieces of their age.


B. Her father was a judge in the Indian Civil Service and she was born in Calcutta in 1815.
C. Julia was neither of these, and didn’t take what she considered to be her first successful portrait
until she was 48.
D. Among her family and in the art world, her work was held in high regard at the time of her death in
1879.
E. Cameron also experimented with scenes from literature, turning her kindly, long-suffering husband
into a heavily-bearded King Lear, from the play by Shakespeare.
F. She even press-ganged passers-by to join the group if they looked right for a picture however
unwilling they were.

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