Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was the most innovative and influential photographer of her generation. With high artistic ambition, she made close-up portraits of leading intellectuals and staged literary and religious scenes.
In 1874, she wrote a description of her first ten years as a photographer, entitled Annals of my Glass House. Peppered with literary quotations, humorous stories and celebrity name-dropping, this unfinished autobiography offers valuable insights into Cameron's character and ambition as a photographer.
The only surviving manuscript of Annals of my Glass House was bequeathed by Cameron's granddaughter, Beatrice Trench, to the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 1928, and is now in the collection of the V&A. Here you can read all 21 handwritten pages in high definition, alongside as faithful a transcription as possible, including the original line-breaks, punctuation, deletions and capitalisation. Note the use of pencil annotations that Cameron added later to the original text. Where possible we have also added a link (in bold and underlined) to the photograph in our collection that Cameron references.
Listen to 'Annals of my Glass House'
Listen to Annals of my Glass House, as read by Julia M Cameron, great great great grandaughter of Julia Margaret Cameron.
