“Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given to my children became my glass house! The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten… all hands and hearts sympathised in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“I believe that… my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focusing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon… ” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the Real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and Beauty. ” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed as ‘The brush takes the next stroke.’ In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
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