Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was a British photographer. Her photographic career was short, spanning the last eleven years of her life. She took up photography at the age of 48, when her daughter gave her a camera as a present. Cameron began photographing everyone in sight. Because of the newness of photography as a practice, she was free to make her own rules and was not bound by convention. Cameron wanted to capture a new kind of photographic truth, not one dependent on the accuracy of sharp detail, but one that depicted the emotional state of her sitter. Her work had an important impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits which are still copied. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."

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