Julia Margaret Cameron Gets a Blue Plaque in Belgravia, Honoring a Late-Blooming Photography Pioneer
A blue plaque has been installed at 10 Chesham Place in Belgravia, marking the London home of Julia Margaret Cameron, the British photographer who began working with a camera at 48 and quickly became one of the most distinctive image-makers of the Victorian era. The honor recognizes an artist whose portraits of Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Carlyle helped define photography as something more searching than likeness alone.
Cameron, who was born in India, approached the medium with unusual seriousness. She also photographed family members, servants, and neighbors, often staging them as angels, saints, or figures from Arthurian legend. The result was a body of work that felt at once intimate and elevated, rooted in domestic life but reaching toward myth.
The plaque was unveiled at a house that was probably only Cameron’s rented London home for about a year, after she and her husband, Charles Hay Cameron, returned from his unsuccessful coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon. The family was never wealthy, despite its connections, and moved repeatedly before settling on the Isle of Wight, where they lived near Tennyson. Cameron later launched her career there at Dimbola Lodge, using a dark room in the coal shed and a studio in the hen house.
Her first successful photograph was a portrait of Annie Philpot, made soon after she took up photography in December 1863. From there, her career advanced with unusual speed. She sold 80 photographs, held a solo exhibition at the British Museum, received bronze and gold medals from the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland, and had work included in the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. She also secured her own portrait studio space at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
The unveiling drew family members from across generations, underscoring how deeply Cameron’s artistic legacy still runs. Among those present were her great-great-great-granddaughter, the musician and DJ Jules Cameron; her great-great-great-niece, the singer Jasmine van den Bogaerde, known as Birdy; and her great-great-nephew, the artist Julian Bell. Her wider family circle also includes Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
Cameron moved to Ceylon in 1875 and died there in 1879, with Charles Hay Cameron dying a year later. Her career was brief, but its influence has proved durable: she helped shift photography away from mere record-keeping and toward a more expressive, psychologically charged art.
