The trailblazing, 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was aged 49 when she first picked up a camera in 1963. Largely self-taught, she crafted her distinct bohemian style pictures with that hazy sepia glow, influential in Victorian Britain, but also photography at large...

I loved what curator Magda Keaney said about her on my podcast.

On her women:

"Cameron's women sitters have great beauty, too. But they in inhabit a space which allows them to have a complexity of character. So they're not ‘just’ beautiful women. They could also be goddesses or heroines or mythological figures… She opens up in her representations a multiplicity of femininity and capacity of being a woman that sort of blows out this idea of ‘just’ having to be this beautiful thing to be viewed."

On her images of astronomer and photographic pioneer, Sir John Herschel:

"He is in this kind of great head floating in space … it’s as though he is looking up to the cosmos, to the stars, and he seems to be in a trance. It's absolutely otherworldly, dreamlike … I love this idea that her aim was to record the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. And actually, it's very bold to take on the subject of man at that time.”

Listen here: