ADVANCED 5 – BRITANICO GOLD – READING TASK – JUN 2023

You are going to read a short article. Five sentences have been removed from the text. Choose from the
sentences A-F the one which fits each gap (31-35). There is an extra sentence you do not need to use.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815—1879)

In the mid-Victorian age, Julia Margaret Cameron was regarded as a curiosity. Photography was in its infancy
and photographers were, with few exceptions, male and either frustrated painters or scientists obsessed with the
details of their new discipline. Julia was neither of these, and didn’t take what she considered to be her first
successful portrait until she was 48. Nevertheless, she showed more talent than many of her male
contemporaries and still holds the record for the highest auction price paid for a single 19th-century British
photograph (£147,000 in 2001).
Her own special style, full of light and shade and slightly out of focus, started, she modestly claimed, as a
‘fluke’. As she explained: ‘When I was focusing one day, I came across something which, to my eye, was very
beautiful, so I stopped there, instead of winding on the lens to the more definite focus which all the other
photographers insist upon.’ The photographic establishment was quick to find fault.
31. ‘As one of the special charms of photography consists in the completeness, detail and finish, we
can scarcely commend works in which the aim appears to have been to avoid these qualities’.
Cameron, however, persevered with her way of capturing images. She took portraits of many famous people of
her time and also liked to photograph people dressed to represent characters in myths and other well-known
stories. 32. She even press-ganged passers-by to join the group if they looked
right for a picture however unwilling they were. People touring the area would make a special trip to see
Cameron at work in her studio.
Cameron’s passion for photography arose out of her family circumstances. Her father was a judge in the Indian
Civil Service and she was born in Calcutta in 1815. In 1838, she married Charles Cameron, a prominent lawyer
and administrator, twenty years her senior, and for nearly a decade the Camerons lived overseas. In 1848, they
moved back to England, but Charles travelled a lot and, as her six children grew up and left home, Cameron
combatted loneliness with photography. 33.

Cameron’s neighbour was the famous poet Tennyson and, at her own expense, she produced an edition of his
book of poems Idylls of the King, which she illustrated with her photos. The poems are about the legendary
King Arthur and his brave knights who fought to protect the weak and the innocent and, in the accompanying
photos, these characters have a heroic beauty. 34. Cameron also
experimented with scenes from literature, turning her kindly, long-suffering husband into a heavily- bearded
King Lear, from the play by Shakespeare.

When the first Dictionary of National Biography was put together in the 1890s, Julia Margaret Cameron was the
only photographer in its pages, and one of only eighteen women in its 420 entries. That she was featured at all
has much to do with the fact that the editor, Leslie Stephen, was married to her favourite niece. 35. Among her
family and in the art world, her work was held in high regard at the time of her death in 1879, but the
photography world was less certain and almost a century passed before it changed its mind.

A. She convinced her family, neighbours, acquaintances and servants to take roles as Greek gods and
goddesses.
B. Besides, she had never seen herself as a traditional home-keeper.
C. The Journal of the London Photographic Society expressed its disapproval.
D. But, despite his help, Cameron’s reputation didn’t immediately survive her.
E. Servants and simple villagers played the king, his queen and the noblemen of the poems.
F. Her surviving prints are now considered masterpieces of their age.