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The Lord Bishop of Winchester / from life, registered photograph copyright Julia Margaret Cameron, Freshwater.
Summary
Half-length portrait of Samuel Wilberforce.
The albumen silver print is a photographic printing process that was widely used in the 19th century. It involves coating paper support with a mixture of egg whites and salt, which creates a glossy surface to hold light-sensitive silver salts. The paper is then sensitized in a solution of silver nitrate, and exposed in a camera or under a negative. After exposure, the print is developed in a solution of gallic acid and silver nitrate, which reduces the silver salts to metallic silver and creates the final image. The albumen print process was widely used for commercial and fine art photography in the 19th century and produced high-quality, detailed images with a distinctive glossy finish.
The gift of the camera came to her in December 1863, at a moment when her husband was away, her sons were at boarding school, and her daughter had married and moved away. “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour... it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” wrote Cameron - forty-eight, a mother of six, deeply religious, well-read, eccentric friend of many of Victorian England’s greatest minds. “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.” Cameron had no interest in establishing a commercial studio. Instead, she enlisted friends, family, and servants, costuming them. Within eighteen months she had sold eighty prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum, established a studio in two of its rooms, and made arrangements with the West End printseller to publish and sell her photographs. In a dozen years of work, effectively ended by the Camerons’ departure for Ceylon's family plantations in 1875, she produced about 900 mesmerizing works, that remain among the most highly admired of Victorian photographs.
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