According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron's great-nieces, "We never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did any one else." This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815-1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than a thousand images over the next fourteen years. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her art through exhibitions and sales, and pursuing the eminent men of her time (Tennyson, Herschel, Carlyle, etc.) as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné.

In addition to a complete catalogue of Cameron's photographs, the book contains information on her photographic experiments and techniques, artistic approach, small-format photographs, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of inspiration. Also provided is a selected bibliography of all major Cameron publications, a list of exhibitions of her work, and a summary of important Cameron collections worldwide.
This catalogue is published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of Cameron's photographs that opens in England in spring 2003 and will be on view at the Getty Museum in autumn 2003.