In the garden of the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, four sisters posed for Tennyson's neighbor and friend Julia Margaret Cameron. This was no family snapshot, no captured moment of reality-the purpose for which William Henry Fox Talbot had invented his photographic process in 1839. Cameron meticulously orchestrated a tableau, personifying a verse in Tennyson's "Come into the Garden, Maud," where flowers, "in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls," are "sunning over with curls" in a "rosebud garden of girls."

Cameron was forty-eight when her daughter gave her a camera in the hopes that it would "amuse" her, and with the assumption that she would join the legion of amateurs who were exploiting the increasingly easy and reliable picture-making possibilities of photography. Instead, Cameron embraced photography with a passionate zeal, challenging the highbrow position that photography was too scientific and too mechanical to be a fine art. By softening the focus, managing the light, and costuming her sitters in homage to her literary sources, Cameron dissolved the boundary between fact-the province of the photographer-and fiction-the realm of the creative artist. She aimed to achieve the same ethereal ideal of beauty that inspired the Victorian poets and the Pre-Raphaelite painters with whom she was closely connected.

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of high Art.
-Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864