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Everyone is a photographer now, but when did photography become for everyone? Was it when an “art photographer” like Walker Evans started collecting postcards—or when he made a penny photographer’s studio an image of America? Was it when the Kodak Instamatic made it easy or when cell phones and social media, like the Brownie more than half a century before them, made it affordable?

Or how about in 1863, when a mother of six received her first camera for Christmas? If the Met was right in 2013, Julia Margaret Cameron became “one of photography’s early masters,” but only by defying a common idea of what counted as halfway decent photography. “Not from the Life,” as she wrote in her notebooks, “but to the Life.” She was speaking of her wish to make photography more vivid than ever before—and her need to do it by mediating reality through fine art. She kept good company. She had the house next door to Alfred Lord Tennyson and photographed the likes of him and his elevated subjects.

As the Morgan Library makes clear more than a decade later, through September 14, she could hardly distinguish the two, no more than family and friends from the Bible or myth. Women for Cameron cast their eyes to the heavens or modestly toward earth. The eyes of men run wild. High Victorian madness or modestly was required, because only the “beauty of the world” suffice. Rather than start from scratch, let me share with you an updated version of my past review of Cameron as a longer review and my latest upload. I work it together with a review also from 2014 of Charles Marville, who became the official photographer of a great city coming to be, with a mission—not to celebrate the new, but to chronicle what was passing away.

With a woman’s face, enlarged on the wall by the exhibition entrance for Cameron, one might wonder if one has caught a glimpse of the photographer herself. It shows a young woman, that much more real and more ethereal thanks to her mute expression and the light that bathes her cheeks, picks out her eyelids, softens the wall behind her, and leaves the rest a shadowy blur. Actually, it is Cameron’s niece posed as “the lovely lady Christabel,” out of the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (“Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark.”) The photographer turned forty-eight the year of her Christmas present, and she was known as the plain sister in a family of beauties.

The temptation to see her there is telling all the same, long before Walker Evans, his postcards, and his penny photographer’s studio. It speaks to a still-new medium’s promise to capture the present moment and to freeze its immediacy forever, as past. It also speaks to Cameron’s wishes, in that unforgettable quote. The Met divides her work into three groups, with portraits of genius, women as subjects from literature and legend made “great through love,” and staged scenes. In practice, the groups are not so easy to tell apart, and the Morgan proceeds by date. Her subjects all belong to much the same world, the world of Victorian poetry and art.

She photographs the Tennyson family at home on the Isle of Wight, right down (the poet complained) to the bags under his eyes, and then illustrates an edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. She portrays John Herschel, the astronomer who coined the term photography, without literary “properties,” but with the same deep highlights and loose hair as for her Christabel, Sappho, or Circe. She presents her husband, a jurist, as King Lear, while framing a seemingly frank female portrait in dark hair and a circular frame, like the Medusa. She turns two young women into an early Renaissance Annunciation, with Perugino’s angel as a badly behaved child. When she photographs Alice Liddell at age twenty, she takes the woman that Lewis Carroll immortalized as a child and returns her to the course of time, but as a goddess. And the imagery, the upturned and downcast eyes, and the light all have their roots in a single movement in English painting, the Pre-Raphaelites.

So do David Wilkie Wynfield’s photographs of William Holman Hunt and George Frederick Watts, the painters, and William Frederick Lake Price’s posed image of Don Quixote in His Study, all also on view at the Met. With Price, a living man has become a character out of Miguel Cervantes who aspired to a myth—and, in turn, the character has become an artist. A dashing young couple as photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander would look quite at home half a century later, in the silent movies. What Cameron adds is her own way of bringing living subjects alive and into high relief, through overexposures. She is mediating between the present and literary time by a further adaptation of oil on canvas, in a softer focus and a deeper light.

Cameron’s accounts of technique’s discovery conflict, as a lucky accident or a deliberate effect. Maybe she herself was conflicted about her amateur status and her artistry, much like Alice Austen in America. She did not keep a portrait studio, in the sense of welcoming sitters, but she did have a studio in which to work, and she upgraded to a larger camera in just three years, in 1866. Her “out-of-focus . . . celebrities” won her sales, but also some nasty criticism. They marked her work as somehow both too artsy and just plain sloppy, but the trap was not hers alone. In bridging the conventions of painting and photography, Cameron found herself caught in long-raging battles over both.

The Met restricts itself to some three dozen prints, all from its collection, and the Morgan needs little more for a fuller picture, and anyway Cameron worked for barely a decade. Born in Calcutta, she returned to Ceylon in 1879, when her husband had property—and the window in time is revealing. British painting was trapped between realism and Romantic longings, until Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent brought “the Impressionist line” to England, where Sargent’s portraits ruled. And meanwhile photography, thanks to Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot, could only recently boast of a deep focus even in exposures under ten minutes, in contrast to streets in earlier French daguerreotypes that appear empty, because moving traffic has vanished into long exposures and the light. At a time when reports from the battlefield in Civil War photography were shockingly new, Cameron’s washed-out details must have seemed both a throwback and a deliberate affront. Long before Alfred Stieglitz in America insisted on the products of a black box as fine art, she must have reminded photographers of something they wished to forget—their debts to both.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

In reviewing “Vermeer’s Love Letters” at the Frick Collection, I tried to stick closely to the exhibition’s three paintings. I had written often about Jan Vermeer, a favorite, in the course of thirty years, including a review of his 1996 Washington retrospective, so I kept focused on the exhibition, relying on past reviews for a fuller picture. Allow me here to except from the first and longest as a brief guide and a teaser.

So little seems to be going on—a woman alone in a private room, few props, no motion, no overt emotion, the letter itself a slim ribbon of light. Jan Vermeer makes no fuss about what she might be reading, what it means to her, and why it deserves to be painted. He seems to lavish all the subtleties of a great colorist and observer on next to nothing.

I keep looking for meaning in Vermeer’s gestures. And I keep returning to the same characteristics—reflected light, intricate but confined spaces, and the slow movement of the eye across a flat surface. He captures only the nuances of reflected light, the edges of a stark room of indefinite dimensions, and a surface almost compulsively divided by a window pane and green curtain. Its implied grid calls to mind the explicit cast-iron grid of the window. In his Milkmaid from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a blemish in the wall captures the light. In room after room of his retrospective, they have filled a museum with clarity and light.

It is an old debate: is art best defined as symbol making or as something that resists interpretation? Does its allegory have a subtext? Has contemporary art triumphed over old narratives with “pure painting,” or is it telling new stories entirely? Do true artists never explain their work, or are they the only ones with the right to try? Both sides beg for the vast institution called art history, and neither side is ready to ask how uniform and coherent that institution really is.

But can labels begin to explain a painting that will not let anyone read its letter? No wonder Jan Vermeer is known as the painter’s painter, the one who most avoids associations with the transient and the insignificant. For many modern admirers the word anecdotal, mere storytelling, is an insult—and an allegory a thing of the distant past. A nearby Dutch interior by another fine artist, Gerrit Dou, could indeed be the anecdotal version. I can enjoy it, but I could stare far longer at Vermeer’s warm, even light. I could feel time pass as it slips from window to wall to her face, then back again to her reflection in the window.

Vermeer keeps returning to women awakening to adulthood. They all struggle to manage their sexuality, self-esteem, and some dubious male propositions. A woman at a window raises her pearls or turns her gaze toward the warm, enveloping light. Another woman hides her face in a drink. I do much the same at parties now. In a later painting, a man again leans over a woman’s shoulder. She looks out, toward the viewer, with a grin somewhere between dazed, ill at ease, and inane. And still they retain that sense of wonder behind the apparent reserve.

Maybe Vermeer is the ultimate postmodernist. His women hold a letter the way a saint might hold the instrument of her doom or her miracle. Like a saint, too, she is left with the same demand to think about her virtue and her fate. Religious painters had used props to evoke texts that had already become canonical. Vermeer creates an artistic canon from a fictitious text and makes that text emblematic of his art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.