From a critical discussion of the work of Victorian photographer Cameron.
What Cameron called her “fancy-subject” pictures—photographs in which two or more costumed sitters enacted, under Cameron’s direction, scenes from the Bible, mythology, Shakespeare, or Tennyson—bear unmistakable traces of the often comical conditions under which they were taken. In many respects they have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s extravagantly awful The Two Ways of Life—rather than among its most vital images.
It is precisely the camera’s realism—its stubborn obsession with the surface of things—that has given Cameron’s theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. It is the truth of the sitting, rather than the fiction which all the dressing up was in aid of, that wafts out of these wonderful and strange, not-quite-in-focus only Lear or Medea. Still photographs of theatrical scenes can never escape being pictures of actors.
What gives Cameron’s pictures of actors their special quality—their status as treasures of photography of an unfathomably peculiar sort—is their singular combination of amateurism and artistry. In The Passing of Arthur, for example, the mast and oar of the makeshift boat representing a royal barge are obviously broomsticks and the water is puts one in mind of good amateur theatricals one has seen, and recalls with shameless delight.
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