To Make Mary: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographs of Altered Madonnas
By Carol Mavor
Looking at Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Madonnas, Carol Mavor brings out some recurring patterns that position Cameron’s photographic work as important subversive feminist artistry in her time. For one, many of the photos use Cameron’s maid to depict the Virgin Mary. Second, Cameron pushed back against standards of “good photography” in the time by prioritizing tactility over clarity. Finally, she refuses to repress the sensual mother from the picture, often expressing both a non-virginal depiction of Mary and motherhood and allowing the mother to have a life with and beyond her child.
Mavor then contextualizes the masculinist culture that valued the “sexual purity” of women but also the sacredness of motherhood. To resolve this contradiction, they desired Mary as a virginal mother, the impossible woman. This woman is drawn up in the concept of the “altar” in its many forms, joining high and low culture, sacred and sexual, ultimately defying the same logic that serves to distinguish between the “good” and the “bad” woman contextually by conjuring up the holy miracle to arrive conveniently in the moment of need. Cameron, herself, played a sort of living miracle, resolving this contradiction between the “good” and “bad” woman in the combination of her life and work. She was a devoted wife and mother but also a renowned professional after her womanly duties were complete. She photographed the “right” content, the Virgin Mary and the innocent child, but with the “wrong” subjects and aesthetics: a lower class maid, the sexual hair, the unclear images, the sensual child, the child with the mother, etc. By resolving the “impossible” contradiction intended to prevent the woman from manifesting this miracle in life, Cameron simultaneously manifested a powerful act of subversion.
It is in this sense that Cameron’s Madonnas are both altered and altared Madonnas. They are altered because they often subvert expectations of the Virgin Mary. They are altared because they straddle the line between “high and low [art], sacred and sexual.” Cameron’s Madonnas cannot be fixed wholly within tradition nor outside of it. In creating their own liminal space, her Madonnas “make Mary (and maternality itself) with a difference” (50).
By placing these images in context with Cameron’s personal history, Mavor shows how Cameron challenged typical views of motherhood, feminine sexuality, and “the proper path” for women more broadly. Cameron was “allowed” to take photos without push back precisely because she had already walked the path of motherhood, religion, and sociability expected of the Victorian bourgeois woman.
