VICTORIAN LENS CAMERON'S WORK SEEN IN NEW LIGHT AT GETTY CENTER EXHIBITION.

Byline: Steve Rosen Correspondent

Pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron has always been well-regarded, but until recently her acclaim came with a caveat.

Her soft-focus portraits were considered as luminously soulful as paintings, but her more theatrical images - tableaux of costumed adults and children posing as literary, religious or mythological figures - were thought to be of less timeless appeal.

``They were thought of as Victorian kitsch,'' says Colin Ford, the founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, England. ``But as we've begun to reassess the paintings of that era, we've reassessed the photographs as well.''

As part of that reassessment, Ford has curated the most important Cameron exhibition to date, ``Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographer,'' at the Getty Center through Jan. 11. Containing 100 images, it was originally an attempt to present a greatest-hits show of the best available prints of her best photographs.

For various reasons, Ford says, he couldn't quite reach that goal. Still, the achievement level is high. ``I can promise you there have never been 100 prints of Cameron's work of such good quality anywhere else,'' he says. The show previously was at the museum in Bradford and London's National Portrait Gallery - the Getty is the only American venue.

A Getty specialty

The Getty has long championed and collected Cameron's work - it had two smaller shows in 1986 and 1996. The 1986 one was its first photo exhibit. In connection with this event, it has published the first systematic catalog of Cameron's approximately 1,200 images. Ford worked on the massive project for years with Julian Cox, the Getty's associate curator of photographs.

The increased regard for Cameron's work - and full recognition of her genius - coincides with changing notions of Britain's Victorian era. Not long ago, contemporary society associated it - and Queen Victoria, herself - with prudishness and a rigid and formal sense of propriety.

But with time, the concurrent artistic romanticism of her era has grown more appealing. Once considered escapist, the almost-hallucinatory innocence of the pre-Raphaelite painters and authors like Lewis Carroll now seems profound. They are admired today for the way they saw through Victorian reality into a dream-state all their own - they were visionaries, in short.

Cameron's work, including her theatrical pieces in this show, fits that definition. For instance, 1864's ``Paul and Virginia'' is really of two children with different names, 3-year-old Freddy Gould and 5-year-old Elizabeth Keown.

Cameron posed them with a parasol and robes and encouraged them to look slightly away and not to smile - not to be real, spontaneous children. In this photo, they could be in a sleepwalk. Cameron turns them into characters in a moral fable, based on a French novel, about a girl who dies after a shipwreck because of excessive modesty. While that narrative isn't inherently apparent in the image, what does come through is the strange yet alluring atmosphere. She creates something new - a domain not rooted in her own time and place.

Transcending the era

Another theatrical photo, ``The Whisper of the Muse/Portrait of G.F. Watts'' from 1865, seems a pictorial dispatch from somewhere far more ancient than Victorian England. It's full of sleepy melancholy. Cameron's thickly bearded family friend (and painter) Watts holds a violin and sadly looks downward, eyes closed, as his young muse hovers over his shoulder.

Cameron was one of the first women to excel at photography - and one of the few to win acclaim in the arts in Victorian Britain. Born in India in 1815 to a British family, she married in 1838 and lived for a time in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her family owned coffee and rubber plantations. In 1848, they moved to the Isle of Wight in Britain. While her husband attended to business, she raised six children.

In 1863, when her husband was traveling, one of her adult daughters presented her with a camera for Christmas. ``It may amuse you Mother to try to Photograph during your solitude,'' she wrote. And Cameron indeed found it amusing - and inspiring. She used family, servants, friends and members of the Isle of Wight artistic community as subjects for some 1,200 photographs.

Experimenting with selective lighting and gently subjective focus, she created images that appear to float. She wanted to make fine art. Cameron also experimented with the development process, making albumen prints with a gauzy, blurry and luxuriantly painterly appearance. Other times, in a precursor of modernism, she allowed such fortuitous imperfections as dust specks or a blur to remain in the final print.

A new perspective

In 1875, she and her husband moved back to Ceylon. This show marks the first time any of the photos taken there, mostly portraits of local residents, have been displayed. She died in 1879, one year before her husband. She is buried in Sri Lanka.

Cameron's more straightforward portraits, often stripped of their literary allusions, have lost none of their appeal. Her men look strong and heroic, flattered by strong directional lighting. Her women, seen in such prints as 1868's ``The Echo,'' 1864's ``Sadness,'' and 1874-75's ``Mariana,'' are romantic ideals. (Roughly one-third of Cameron's total output consisted of studies of women, most of them under 30.)

They look forlorn and distant - as if enveloped in mist. The dreamy ``Sadness,'' which has some image loss as a result of an accident that occurred during processing, makes its 16-year-old subject, actress Ellen Tracy, seem much older than her age.

Oddly, the exceptions to Cameron's stylistic approach result in her most riveting work. In 1872's ``I Wait/Rachel Gurney,'' the child subject - surrounded by a pair of prop wings - challenges Cameron's intention to idealize her as angelic. She stares wide-eyed right at the camera, as if warily seeing through all of the ideas that propel Cameron's work.

And Julia Jackson, Cameron's niece and favorite subject (she was photographed some 50 times), comes off as strong and forceful in 1867's ``My Niece Julia.'' Cameron framed her with a dramatic raking light that highlights her commanding facial features. It makes her look alert rather than passively romantic.

Jackson, by the way, was Virginia Woolf's mother. ``When you see 'The Hours' and Nicole Kidman's nose, there it is,'' Ford says.

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON: PHOTOGRAPHER

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Exhibit runs through Jan. 11.

Tickets: Admission is free; parking is $5. Call [phone] for information or to make parking reservations. Web: www.getty.edu.

Related event: At 8 p.m. Nov. 14-15 and 3 p.m. Nov. 16, the Getty will sponsor a Long Beach Opera presentation of Virginia Woolf's ``Freshwater,'' a play about Cameron, with chamber music and songs by Rebecca Clarke. Admission is $45 to $55.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) In 1872's ``I Wait/Rachel Gurney,'' the child subject, surrounded by a pair of prop wings, complicates those wings' iconography by folding her arms and staring blankly at the camera.

(2) Julia Margaret Cameron's ``Paul and Virginia'' (1864) depicts two children as characters in a moral fable about a girl who dies after a shipwreck because of excessive modesty.

(3) Artistic inspiration is extremely close at hand in ``The Whisper of the Muse/Portrait of G.F. Watts'' (1865).