The eternity of feminine beauty

Photographers’ work separated by time - and sensibility

July 24, 2009|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

PORTLAND, Maine - More than a century separates the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron from those of Joyce Tenneson. Yet their affinity is plain. Both present feminine beauty as something ethereal and spiritual. Both traffic in allegory and an air of otherworldliness. Both try, in a sense, to visualize the eternal.

There the similarity ends. Cameron’s work is quintessentially Victorian. Indeed, her images not only reflect the sensibility of her era, they helped shape it. Tenneson’s images, which she took between 1986 and 2004, seem as contemporary - and substantial - as clouds. In fact, many of the 27 large-format photographs in “Joyce Tenneson: Polaroid Portraits,’’ which runs at the Portland Museum of Art through Oct. 4, look as though they could have been taken in clouds. They’re that gauzy and pallid. The cumulative effect is of cumulus.

The Victorian sensibility evident in “ ‘For My Best Beloved Sister Mia’: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron,’’ which runs at Portland through Sept. 7, hasn’t vanished, of course. Browse through a selection of Hallmark greeting cards. Visit a Laura Ashley boutique. Picture the inside of Martha Stewart’s imagination. What’s startling about seeing so many of Cameron’s images - nearly 50, with another two dozen in the show by friends and collaborators of hers - is how it lets us see Victorian values afresh.

Allegorical titles like “Cupid,’’ “Devotion,’’ “Divine Love,’’ and “Madonna and Child’’ had not been sicklied o’er with the pale cast of cant when Cameron (1815-79) chose to bestow them. Women with Pre-Raphaelite abundances of hair were meant to be understood as actual women rather than allusions to 19th-century paintings. Cameron’s tableaux may verge on cloying today, but they’re sincerely, naturally cloying.

The title of the show helps explain that sincerity. The emotion was a function of family as well as culture. The images in “ ‘For My Best Beloved Sister Mia’ ’’ come from an album of photographs Cameron gathered for her younger sister. The original album, a mighty-looking arrangement of brown leather, is on display as part of the exhibition.