Stand There! She Shouted

The lens turns to Julia Margaret Cameron, an ambitious and fascinating early photographer of 1800s celebrities including Tennyson and Darwin. The girls in Julia Margaret's family were known as "the beautiful Miss Pattles" - all except her. Plain, short and clever, Julia Margaret would eventually create her own beauty in the photographs she produced. Susan Goldman Rubin follows the groundbreaking photographer from her privileged childhood in Calcutta and Versailles to her role in bohemian salons in England, whose luminaries - Alfred Tennyson and many others - would later pose for her portraits. Commanding and eccentric, Julia Margaret Cameron persuaded children and friends to dress up and hold still for the long sittings needed to stage scenes based on literature and myth. Featuring a wonderful variety of photographs and gorgeous illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline, this engrossing biography illuminates the very beginnings of photography - and the determined woman who, in her own middle age, mastered its cumbersome equipment and made the art form her own. This is a biography on a woman artist, which are sorely lacking in the current marketplace. It features more than a dozen vintage photographs as well as wonderful illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline. Cameron's subjects were frequently children who were portrayed in simple, youthful beauty, with just a tinge of melancholoy, which make for compelling photos for young readers.