Newspaper To Vima
Fairy tales are made of strange materials. Allegories, symbolism, insinuations, abstractions, exaggerations, and elliptical shapes woven into a canvas of magic. Fairy tales are built from a layer of falsehood that hides (and reveals) a substrate of truth. Fairy tales appeal to the imagination using the forms of logic. However, all of the above also remind us of photography. Every photograph. Since every photograph is a fairy tale. It shows what logic understands and implies what the imagination conjures.
Julia Margaret Cameron used to tell fairy tales to her children. About her great-grandmother who was in the court of Marie Antoinette or about her father who fought with the lancers of Bengal. Then she discovered the great fairy tale of art. Of painting and poetry. Lancelot and Guinevere, Ophelia and Hamlet, along with the otherworldly painted figures of her Pre-Raphaelite friends became her dreamy and simultaneously real world. Then she discovered that her camera lens could also tell such stories. And that her kin might have been reincarnations of the heroes dwelling in her dreams. Then she went to Italy and discovered that centuries earlier, in a region encompassing Tuscany and Umbria, some painters had transformed Gods, Madonnas, and Saints into the heroes of their own fairy tales.
In 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron photographed her own Holy Family. She enclosed it in an imaginary circle. A circle formed by the figures themselves, the darkness, and the light. Nest and prison. The sanctity is drawn from the one, the first, the wonderful fairy tale. But it is transformed into an eternal symbol, where the manger exists as a memory. The figures are us, you, yesterday, today, and always. The fairy tale of a cold night in Bethlehem gave its place to another fairy tale, that of photography, with the power of the realm of imagination, the world of art, the domain of dreams, to interchange forms and be simultaneously different and the same.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Ceylon (1815), lived in England, and died in Ceylon (1879). She married, had many children, mingled with famous painters and poets of her time, until the day when in her mature age she discovered the then new art of photography. The last sixteen years of her life she dedicated to it and left behind the first significant and structured artistic photographic work in history.
Plato Rivellis