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Dismantling the Gaze: Lininality, Seeing
and Julia Margaret Cameron's Sri Lankan Photographs.

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Ranchanakesi Channa Prajapati Harnapala

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DISMANTLING THE GAZE: LIMINALITY, SEEING AND JULIA MARGARET
CAMERON’S SRI LANKAN PHOTOGRAPHS

By

Kanchanakesi Channa Prajapati Warnapala

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirement
for the degree of
MASTERS OF ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

2003

ABSTRACT
DISMANTLING THE GAZE: 1.1MINAIITY, SEEING AND JULIA MARGARET
CAMERON’S SRI LANKAN PHOTOGRAPHS
By .

Kanchanakesi Channa Praj apati Warnapala

Colonial photography has mostly been European imaginings of the “0th ’ immersed in
more fantasy than reality. However, Julia Margaret Cameron’s pictures of the Sri
Lankans become problematic when viewed as mere derogatory representations of the
native. To conclude that Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs are more imaginative fiction
than reality is to disregard the tensions surrounding the photographs, which at the same
time both empower and disempower the native. This paper attempts to demonstrate that
these tensions arise because of Cameron’s own position in the colonies, as a woman as
well as a woman photographer, taking into consideration her own problematic status in

Victorian society as a woman born and bred in the colonies.

Dismantling the Gaze: Liminality, Seeing and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Sri
Lankan Photographs
Although Julia Margaret Cameron has been acknowledged as one of the
pioneering figures in the history of photography and many have examined her
photographs for their beauty and mastery, her Sri Lankan pictures have remained largely
ignored.1 They have either been considered as amateurish work, unworthy of any merit or
have been discarded as merely insignificant and hardly evocative of Cameron’s
photographic genius. When they have caught the attention of critics, it has been mainly to
expose them as another instance of representing the native in derogatory terms. Of
course, it is a difficult venture to read colonial photography as anything but imaginative
fiction far removed from reality, where the native is not only depicted on unequal terms
but also deliberately constructed as racially, socially, morally and intellectually inferior.
Yet to conclude that Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs are simple representations of the
native (derogatory or otherwise) is to disregard the tensions surrounding the photographs.
Such tensions empower and disempower the native at the same time, although the
distinctions get dangerously blurred in many respects. These can only be understood by
examining Cameron’s own position in the colonies, as a woman as well as a woman
photographer, taking into account her own problematic status in Victorian society as a
woman born and bred in the colonies. In order to decipher Cameron’s peculiar location in
relation to her Sri Lankan photographs as well as to (re)view her pictures of the native,
we must first situate her work within the larger discourse of colonial photography itself.
Representations of colonized peoples reached their zenith in the late nineteenth

century, when both professional and amateur photographers avidly traveled around the

world, recording native peoples for the purposes of display. Colonial exhibitions became
immensely popular in this period where “so-called savages or primitives were made
available for visual inspection by millions of strolling and staring western
citizens”(Corbey 338). While these world fairs in the western metropolis sought to
provide visual justification for the imperial process itself, which was in need of an excuse
to validate any violence involved in the conquest and suppression of the intellectually
inferior savage, photography served as a perfect medium to record the otherness of these
peoples. Photography’s supposed association with authenticity and objectivity validated
these visual impressions of the native and helped photography adopt one of its pivotal
roles, that of documenting the other. Its main agenda was to highlight the primitiveness of
the other, and as Anne Maxwell aptly points out, “The idea was not just to expose the
masses to the spectacle of racial difference, but also to make people of White Anglo-
Saxon nations feel mentally, physically and morally superior to the colonized, using a
language that the public would understand-a language of stark oppositions”(2). Graphic
depictions of racial difference could be staged by photography where the snapshots
served as evidence of a world of otherness hence only imagined or imaginatively
depicted through painting.

At first glance, it seems as if Cameron does indeed employ this technique of
highlighting difference when she chooses to depict her Sri Lankan women as distinctly
different from her European models. When staging the Sri Lankan, she clearly discards
certain photographic conventions that she adopts while living in England.2 In order to
demonstrate the particular vision articulated by Cameron, 3 critical analysis of some of

her Sri Lankan pictures is necessary and for this reason, I shall closely examine three of

Cameron’s photographs of a Sri Lankan woman taken during Cameron’s not so brief stay
in Sri Lanka which lasted almost five years till her death in 1879. These photographs
clearly reflect that Cameron was engaged in a different project with her Sri Lankan
prints.

In many respects, Cameron’s Sri Lankan pictures seem Eurocentric when
compared to her English photographs of women, which evoke a sense of religiosity and
purity. While the English women are mostly rendered as historical, religious, allegorical
or legendary subjects such as the Madonnas’, the Sri Lankan woman has been stripped of
such visual trappings. Whereas the English sitters are transformed into figures of
mysticism inhabiting the heavenly rather than the earthly sphere, such as in the
photograph the La Santa Julia (1867) 4, the Sri Lankan woman is denied the necessary
mystical attire for such a metamorphosis. The native woman seems to be dressed in her
habitual garb, the sari, and is not wrapped dramatically in fabric to evoke literary and
historical figures. Instead she seem to satisfy the European stereotype of the visual
difference between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of dress where the corseted
Victorian woman is held up as the ideal against the indecently clad Sri Lankan in
somewhat revealing clothes. Such visual depictions of the native woman conveniently
play into the stereotype of the highly sexualized native woman who poses a threat to the
white male. As James Ryan demonstrates such images “found their greatest expression in
the salacious and pornographic photographs of the colonial harem manufactured by
European photographers”(5 3) as evidence of the hypersexual non-westem woman. If

women’s bodies become the focal point of interest in colonial photography, then the

clothes that cover that body too gain visual significance. In this case, the significant lack
of clothing holds Cameron’s attention.

Certainly the women in Cameron’s English portraits are enveloped in layers of
clothes. But the Sri Lankan woman is barely covered by them. For instance, the “half-
length portrait of woman” (fig. 1) reveals the gulf between the European and the Sri

Lankan native.

 

Figure l - Half-length portrait of woman.

Source: Lukitsh, “Simply Pictures of Peasants,” 1996.

The way the sari is draped around the upper body of the woman model so as to leave bare
her right shoulder hints at difference from the bountifully clothed Victorian women at the

time. Likewise, the “unidentified girl standing by fence and vines” (fig. 2) and the

“Ceylonese woman, Kalutara” (fig. 3) seem to emphasize the sparseness of the sari as a
covering for the native body, especially considering the tightly laced clothes women were
in Victorian England. Thus, nakedness, the stereotypical marker of difference, comes into
play as the savage-civil divide is reinforced.5 While colonial photography emphasizing
such “primitiveness” served as a mode of visual justification for the Empire as well as for
the European’s civilizing mission, this Sri Lankan woman becomes testimony to the
uncivilized presence of the “other” in need of the colonizer’s civilizing project.

The emphasis on the nakedness of this woman not only hints at such a visual
difference but also seems to enact violence on the native. The violence on the native is
aggravated by the fact that the gaze of the photographer/spectator is usually associated
with that of a patriarchal gaze. Cameron has been attributed a male gaze by critics,
especially in her treatment of the English women who are after all cast as emotional,
virginal and predominantly asexual. Hopkinson states that Cameron “saw women very
much as a male photographer might have done, and how her predominantly male
purchasers certainly would have done” by casting them as representing “beauty, delicacy,
maternity and spirituality” (110), figures to be either ravished or venerated by the male
viewer. Critics like Carol Mavor have suggested otherwise and have argued that although
Cameron has escaped being labeled as perverse, the pictures nevertheless “move
metaphorically between categories,, smearing the lines between sexual and not-sexual,
male and female, earthly and heavenly’ ’(47). But such observations leave aside the fact
that sexuality and sensuality are only implicit by suggestion in the photographs of the
English women and do not boldly emerge through the images, unlike her Sri Lankan

portraits.

Of course such sexuality becomes disempowering for the native especially as
male photographers have focused on the native female body as a sexualized object for
their viewing pleasure. While native women were in certain instances forced to disrobe
for photographs 6, such actions also allowed the photographer to depict the colonies as a
place of sexual excess where the women were licentious and willing partners for the
European male. Such portrayals then helped deflect the violence enacted on the native
woman by depicting her as the immoral savage. To an extent, a male gaze fimctions in
Cameron’s Sri Lankan portraits when the native woman seems to be gradually stripped of
her garments. Having said that, it is worthy engaging in a more detailed study of the Sri
Lankan pictures. What we encounter in fig. 1, for example, is a half-length portrait of a
young woman, whose head is slightly turned sideways. Although she does not face the
camera, the fact that she is conscious of its effect is seen through her hand. She seems
clearly uncomfortable at this bodily intrusion especially since her fingers are rigid. They
are not relaxed. In fact, they jut forward in an awkward manner. She seems to be clearly
tense and conscious that the photographic gaze, with its harsh lighting, acts as a voyeur
cutting into her bare flesh. The way her thumb tries to conceal what it cannot is a sign of
her clear embarrassment at this display of the nakedness. The sense of violence and
entrapment becomes apparent in the positioning of her hands. It speaks of her vain
attempts to conceal her self. The irony is that the very attempt to cover her nakedness has
an unusual effect on the viewer. It directs his eye onto the very object it tries to conceal.

Similarly the “unidentified woman standing by fence and vines” (fig. 2) depicts a
native who is literally trapped against the hedge, half undressed while the lighting acts so

as to further bare her body. The focus is definitely not on her face but on her body and the

photograph is carefully staged presenting the viewer with her form. At first glance, we
see a three-quarter length profile of a young woman. But immediately we perceive her

somewhat awkward pose.

 

Figure 2 - unidentified girl standing by fence and vines.

Source: Lukitsh, 1996

Although she gives the impression of leaning against a hedge, her posture is far from
relaxed. The body almost seems to be twisted, her hips facing the camera while her upper
body is pictured sideways. It is hard not to notice the way her legs somewhat open out,
deliberately putting the body on display. The fact that she is arranged before the camera
is suggested through the positioning of her whole body. Her arms are held at the same
angles as her legs, creating a picturesque effect, however inconvenient it is to the native

model.

While the other Sri Lankan photographs clearly focus on the face and the
expression of the eyes rather than on the body, the picture of the “Ceylonese woman,
Kalutara” (fig. 3) seems to concentrate specifically on her body, instead of her face. The
lighting reveals the bare shoulders and arms to the viewer. The face is not clearly
discernible although the light does slightly trace the outline of her features. Her
expression cannot be distinctly seen, nor can her eyes. Although it looks as if Cameron is
trying to emphasize her hand with its numerous rings, the effect is that the viewer
concentrates on the bare flesh even more. The light strongly cuts across her back, offering
up her body further for voyeuristic pleasure and evoking sensuality. The rings and the
chain around her neck draw the viewer’s eyes not to the jewelry but to the bare back that

is dramatically illuminated.

 

Figure 3 - Ceylonese woman, Kalutara.

Source: Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1975.

The violence becomes obvious from the positioning of this woman’s hands. It is as if she
realizes the violation taking place, as the lighting seems to cut across her bare shoulders,
back and neck. She seems to shield her body from such an intrusion by covering herself
with her arms. Cameron’s choice of frame heightens this effect as well. The round fi'ame
clearly leaves no room for the viewer to divert his gaze. He is directed to the center of the
frame where Cameron places her model. And the fact that the background is almost in the
dark and the nakedness sharply focused by the light intensifies this effect. Emphasizing
the bare, exposed skin speaks the language of sensuality and difference while these
bodies become not only sites of pleasure for the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer but also
sites of violence where the women become obj ectified mercilessly. As Alison Smith
observes, in the mid nineteenth century such images of “women in various states of
undress helped secure the notion that male desire was instinctive and needed constant
gratification”. Smith goes to add that it was “hardly surprising that pornographic images
followed quickly upon the popularisation of a medium that was seen to transcribe the real
so directly”, especially as the “erotic was associated with the female body’ ’(5 5).

Besides being subject to such violence, the Sri Lankan woman (fig.3) is also
deprived of certain privileges accorded to Cameron’s English women in garden settings.
Cameron focuses on the eyes of these English women, attributing to them a sense of
depth. The eyes are well defined in these portraits. Both Maud, 1875 7and Aletheia 18728,
e.g., have an aura of mystery surrounding them. Both of these English women are made
to look away from the camera, and although the lighting does expose the neck and face, it
is the expression of sadness and a sense of solemnity that captures the viewer. The way

the women are positioned within the frame so that their faces almost sink into the wall

caressing the foliage guides the viewer to take note of their countenance. Lukitsh points
out that in these images of single female figures amidst flowers, “a more diffuse lighting
makes the overall image more harmonious, suggesting the symbolic connection between
femininity and nature”(Cameron 11). The distant expression in their eyes seems to
attribute to both of these women an ethereal quality. But in the case of the Sri Lankan
woman, the eyes are hardly visible, closing all avenues to any indications of such
spiritual and hence ennobling sentiments.

The absence of a large body of Sri Lankan photographs has seemed to some
critics to document Cameron’s lack of admiration for the native. Hopkinson points out
that Cameron’s best photographic work was of “individuals whom she knew and
admired, using intimacy to elicit what she called their souls through their expressions and
features”(158). Of course, Hopkinson herself has posited the argument that such a lack of
pictures was due to “the intense heat and humidity, the lack of a studio and perhaps also a
shortage of chemicals or stimulus”(92). Yet such harsh conditions did not prevent other
colonial photographers from setting up lucrative commercial enterprises in Sri Lanka
during the nineteenth century.9 Surely such external conditions would have been only a
slight deterrent for a woman who after all converted her coal-house into a dark room and
the chicken shed into a glass house or studio. As Brian Hill notes, Cameron had difficulty
in even obtaining running water in order to develop the photographs in England. In
Cameron’s letter to an old Calcutta friend, she writes, “it has been real labor, for in all
freezing weather, I have poured nine cans of water fresh from the well over each

photograph”(Hill 106). Thus what is disconcerting is that Cameron did have opportunities

10

not only to take pictures of Sri Lankans but also to exhibit them although she seems to
have chosen not to.

In fact exhibitions abroad were not totally closed to the resident photographers in
Sri Lanka like W.L.H. Skeen, one of the foremost commercial photographers of Sri

10 Then Cameron would have surely been able to make

Lanka in the nineteenth century.
her Sri Lankan prints available abroad had she chosen to do so. This indeed places
Cameron in a peculiar position where she does not choose to exhibit her Sri Lankan
photographs or produce them on a large scale for exhibition. Such a move is out of
character for a woman like Cameron who definitely relied on exhibitions not only for
recognition but also as a means for sales.ll So her lack of interest in exhibiting the Sri
Lankan photographs perhaps indicates that the native Sri Lankan body could not live up
to the aesthetic ideals embedded in the English beauties of Cameron.

So the argument that external conditions hindered her photographing the Sri
Lankan seems to collapse and such an analysis clearly breaks down in the face of
Cameron’s enthusiasm to picture Marianne North while in Sri Lanka. North, in her
autobiography, describes Cameron’s passionate interest to photograph her: “[Cameron]
made up her mind at once to photograph me, and for 3 days, kept herself in a fever of
excitement about it”(315). Not only is Cameron’s enthusiasm remarkable but also her
manner of staging North. North is dressed up in “flowering draperies of cashmere wool”,
made to let down her hair, and is staged against a backdrop of coconut branches and later
on amidst breadfruit leaves and fruits. Clearly Cameron yearns for the picturesque with

the manipulation of dress and backdrop. Hence Sri Lanka has not apparently made her

lose her flair for the photograph.

11

Yet the very manner in which Cameron casts North while in Sri Lanka is unusual.
Her portrait of North cashes in on the exotic as North comes to be immersed in lush
surroundings”. Cameron thus fits her European visitor into a familiar fiamework where
Sri Lanka becomes the tropical paradise for the Western traveler. During this time,
“photographers were seeking an ideal Ceylon for European audiences” and “the favorite
themes were lush foliage plants and vegetation of an exotic nature to convey the
arnbience of an oriental country with a lush tropical climate”(Raheem 17). Cameron’s
persistent desire to picture North in an exotic setting is aptly conveyed by North herself.
When Cameron’s first efforts to depict North among cocoa nut leaves fails, she resorts to
other plans: “Then [Cameron] tried me with a background of breadfruit leaves and mu,
nailed flat against a window shutter, and told them to look natural, but both failed” (315).
Of course, what is significant in Cameron’s act is the very fact that she does not place her
native in such exotic surroundings.

While there is no doubt that such photographs presenting Sri Lanka as a land of
bounty were appealing to a European audience, Cameron’s refiisal to exoticize the
landscape actually hints at a complexity in her Sri Lankan photographs. Her move not to
put up the native for anthropological display at exhibitions or freeze the native in a
fiamework of exoticism clearly suggests that Cameron is not the usual photographer in
the colonies. She departs from certain touristic conventionalities of depicting the subject
race. James Ryan demonstrates how “scenes of tropical vegetation —improvised with
paint and plants in the studio as well as in outdoor locations-were employed frequently as
backdrops for images of exotic women”(53) during the late nineteenth century. In such

instances, the exotic and erotic collude and even the landscape assumes the form of

12

“fleeting beauties to be conquered by the male and white power of endurance”(Ryan 53).
This is heightened when the native woman is set against such picturesque scenery. Ryan
goes on to add that the “stereotype of the sexually exotic Oriental woman” found
expression in places like India where the photographers “exploited the existing
associations between the Orient and sex”(53). Hence, both the feminized landscape and
the eroticized native woman inevitably become subject to the penetrating gaze of the
European. Cameron’s significant lack of such photographs speaks of her refiisal to
accommodate such aesthetic conventions of her time and thereby make available the
native to a voyeuristic gaze.

Cameron’s blatant refiisal to comply with such aesthetics conflonts us in the form
of “The Kalutara Woman” (fig.3). Even though this woman model initially gives the
impression of being literally confined by the flame, this image acts out many of the
tensions found in all of Cameron’s pictures. The glimpse of the arm of the chair on which
the woman is placed is significant. Although the portion of the chair that juts forward
could be mistaken for a bamboo shoot, it still sticks out especially when the viewer looks
closely at her hand and the bangles that are illuminated by the lighting. This actually
interferes with the idyllic setting of a garden. Cameron has clearly not made her native
model move a little forward so as to cover the chair. While this takes away flom the
aesthetic beauty of the photograph, it actually, in a strange fashion, attributes a sense of
power to the Sri Lankan woman. It more than hints at the fact that she has been made to
sit and pose for this photograph. In an era when the colonized native was being
meticulously staged in studios with props and the necessary paraphernalia, Cameron's

model is made to stick out as it were. This is perhaps a gesture on the part of Cameron to

13

indicate that many colonial photographs are artificially compiled according to the western
appetite for visual images of the native that serve to affirm European's cultural and racial
difference. The Sri Lankan woman is clearly not one emerging flom the vines but one
who is positioned in such a way for the purpose of a picture. Of course, while such a
staging speaks of her literal capture by the camera, it also grants her subjectivity. She is
not and cannot be completely contained within the flame as the photograph itself resists
fitting into an aesthetic flame. The result is that the photograph does not accord the
viewer the uninhibited pleasure of gazing at a native woman.

What is interesting is that Cameron’s photographs of the Sri Lankan woman do
not seem to satisfy the voyeuristic needs of the West. Helrnut Gemsheim dismisses the
Sri Lankan pictures as “quite unimportant”, assigning them to an amateur (83).
Hopkinson believes the Sri Lankan prints to be “surely among her least representative
work”(34). One reason why these Sri Lankan pictures have been largely ignored could be
that Cameron does not stage her native models amidst exotic surroundings. She actually
uproots the native flom an ethnological setting and does not crave to capture the scenery.
The implications of Cameron’s reversal of the usual norm of photographing the native in
an ethnological setting can only be discerned by taking into consideration the work of
other photographers at this time.

Although Cameron’s apparent disinterest in capturing the native for photographs
as well as photographic exhibitions might seem to hint at her privileging the English
models as fitting subjects for photography over the Sri Lankan native, such an argument
collapses when examining the genre of colonial photography. For instance, Cameron’s

refusal to ignore the current trend in colonial photography when picturing exotic peoples

l4

in distant lands had become a lucrative commercial enterprise for many individuals,
speaks volumes of her very regard for the native subject. While photographers like John
Thomson, Samuel Boume and Roger F enton were photographing the native in different
parts of the world, 13 Sri Lanka was very much in the picture where photography was
concerned. Two figures that avidly pictured Sri Lanka were W.L.H Skeen and C Scowen.
Sri Lanka attracted these individuals more for its scenic beauty and cultural history rather
than the people per se. Whereas the foliage captured their interest and the talipot palm,
the banyan tree and the screw pine became the preferred concern 14, people were not
exactly insignificant but became secondary to the lush tropical vegetation. When the
natives did become the point of interest, they became more ethnographical studies,
serving as documentary evidence of various racial types in Ceylon in their various
costumes. Men and women of different ethnic communities in their picturesque attire
were arranged in the studio supplying documentary evidence for the existence of different
communities in Sri Lanka.

Being resident photographers like Cameron, both Skeen and Scowen did not limit
themselves to picturesque views of exotic landscapes. They did several studies of women.
However these differ flom Cameron’s in significant ways. Scowen’s picture of a girl
with a vase15 is a fitting comparison to Cameron’s pictures although it bears slight
resemblance to Cameron’s “Ceylonese woman, Kalutara”. The native Cameron depicts
is seemingly made to turn away flom the camera just as Scowen’s models is made to do
so that the focus is more on the body. Yet Scowen’s photograph is different in that this
girl’s dress or the very lack of that much of covering is made obvious. She is apparently

flom the Rodiya caste, which seems to have created considerable interest amongst

15

English photographers due to their form of dress where the upper body is not covered.
However, in this picture, Scowen is not simply documenting a type of woman of a certain
group. He is also clearly highlighting her nakedness. The young woman is seated and is
deliberately made to lean onto the vase she has placed against her side, the result being a
generous View of her chest. It directs the viewer to gaze more at her bare breasts. But
what is fundamentally distinct is that this picture actually enacts an eroticism that
disables the photographic subject by satisfying the male gaze. The sexual voyeurism is
obvious when the young girl’s demure glance suggestively invites the spectator to feast
on her adolescent body.

Photographers like Skeen were not just professionals who descended upon the
colonies merely to picture Sri Lanka. His father, William Skeen had firmly established
himself as a printer and according to Raheem and Thome, the photographic business was
“primarily intended for his eldest son, William Skeen , who was training in England at
the London School of photography/”(14). In this respect, Skeen is similar to Cameron as
both had considerable ties to the colonies although he chose to exhibit his work flom time
to time. His pictures of Sri Lankan women are different flom Cameron, setting Cameron
apart flom the trend at that time. Skeen’s pictures of women that are more artistic studies
than documentaries of racial types still suggest a certain vulnerability that disempower
the women. For instance, Skeen’s picture of a woman holding a palm leaf over her head
titled the “Tamil Lady”16 depicts a native seductively lowering her eyes but at the same
time teasingly holding the gaze of the viewer by a flirtish smile. Such a gesture seems to
make her body available to the viewer, gratifying the spectator. The result is that the

colonized woman relapses into satisfying patriarchal colonial prescriptions.

l6

Cameron certainly creates a breach in convention when she separates the native
flom the usual setting of an ethnological backdrop. Figure 2 exemplifies this well. That
the native woman is arranged to aesthetically please the viewer is apparent flom the
symmetrical angles of the picture. Her hands align with the positioning of her legs and
head. But even though it depicts a desirable female placed against a picturesque
backdrop, this picture serves to defy certain conventions of picturing the native. She is
pictured against a setting that is devoid of ethnological markers. It does not place her in
Sri Lanka, thereby signaling Cameron’s refusal to place and categorize the native. Such a
gesture implies an intimacy that complicates her attitude to the Sri Lankan photographs
after all. Therefore, although the Sri Lankan photographs seem to conform to particular
stereotypes, and while on one level they do, they are also extremely complicated pictures,
signaling a perpetual ambiguity in Cameron in reference to her Sri Lankan photographs.

Even though it could be argued that Cameron creates a dichotomy between the
virginal purity of the English woman and the sensuality and sexual licentiousness of the
native woman, the fact that she does not dismantle the Sri Lankan woman of her
individuality by reconfiguring her as a type (for instance, the Virgin Mary) supports the
idea that Cameron in fact empowers the native woman.17 The fact that the Sri Lankan
woman is not presented in allegorical terms perhaps suggests that she can stand alone as
an individual, instead of an imaginary fiction. During this period, allegorical paintings of
natives especially as harem women had become popular. Ryan illustrates that “Drawing
on an established iconography of the Orient in painting, literature and architecture,
photographers invented their own ‘Orient’ in the studio with props, backdrops and the

directed poses of scantily dressed ‘Oriental’ female models”(53). The work of Roger

l7

F enton, a Victorian photographer of the Crimean war is such an example. What is
striking is that Fenton recreated Crimea in his own London studio, depicting women
stretched out on divans in harem-like settings. 18 Yet Cameron clearly steers her native
model away flom the allegorical.

Although the nakedness literally strips the native of her dignity and subjects her to
violence, it also grants her agency when one examines Cameron’s English portraits, once
again reinforcing her ambivalence towards her Sri Lankan photographs. Her English
pictures flequently depict the Madonna who is chaste and beautiful, accompanied by one
or two children, only to reinforce the woman’s role as the nurturer. This mother-child
motif often occurs in colonial photography taken in Ceylon. For instance, Henry Cave, an
English photographer who took a series of pictures of Ceylon captures the native woman
in the role of the mother. His photographs of the Gram Vendor and the Grass Cutter19
emphasize their maternal roles while still engaging in fatiguing work. So by accentuating
the role of the woman as nurturing, loving, dutiful and self-sacrificing, these photographs
inevitably desexualize these subjects into pure passionless creatures who can only be
enervated by the desiring male gaze. Even though such depictions can be seen as attempts
to incorporate the native woman into certain mainstream photographic conventions, such
a reading blatantly disregards the fact that such poses are reductive. They are almost
nostalgic, evidence of a land that is literally domesticated by European male presence and
hence posing no threat to his masculinity.20

Annie E Coombes points out how motherhood was an exploited theme especially
in Afiican colonial photography where the “symbol of the Afiican woman served as a

means of chastising feminist tendencies amongst white British women”(100) who were

18

neglecting their true vocation in life. Yet such pictures take on additional significance
within the dominant discourse of the civilizing mission. When the emphasis on racial
purity reached intense heights due to the threat of miscegenation in the nineteenth
century, such pictures of women with children surely ease the tensions between the white
male and the dusky woman. These dark bodies are clearly bound by motherhood erasing
any anxiety on the part of the white male, thus cleansing the imperial project of any
probable impurities. Perhaps this is why a photographer like Cave chose to depict the Sri
Lankan woman in her motherly role.

Yet what is noticeable is that Cameron does not visualize her native women in
this maternal role. Hence, she grants them sexual agency, especially by transcribing
sexual energy into their poses as well as their looks. She thus refuses to be “womanly”
and proper by limiting herself to picturing this woman purely in terms of her reproductive
role. Although some critics have read sexuality in her English photographs, they have
mainly been categorized as safe, and as Mavor suggests, Cameron “has been saved by her
maternal life-style, which includes a house full of children”(25). Mavor indicates that
“like good Victorians, historians have preferred to bathe in the apparent ‘neutrality’ (as
conventionally defined) and ‘purity’ of her pictures”(25). But Cameron curiously
empowers herself with her Sri Lankan photographs by throwing off the banner of
respectability by assuming the mantle of sexuality. Although Madonnas were one of her
favorite themes in England, she abandons it in Sri Lanka, the result being her own
empowerment as well as the Sri Lankan woman. This is precisely because the Madonnas
“appear to conform with the expectations of a Victorian woman. Using Christian

typology, the pictures properly contain woman’s sexuality within a space of holy

19

motherhood”(Mavor 47). If this is the case, the fact that the Sri Lankan woman is not
visualized hence suggests that Cameron is daring to be different carving a different visual
space for herself in terms of photography as well as her own identity as a woman
photographer.

Cameron’s model erodes any pleasure that the male viewer might experience in
seeing the woman in her “proper” and safe role and the woman artist adopting
appropriate subjects for representation. Cameron ceases to become the respectable artist
in Sri Lanka by openly defying male expectations. By evading exhibition of such prints,
she aligns herself with the Sri Lankan by rejecting prevailing photographic conventions,
which failed to take into account the feelings of the colonized. Even though they could be
taken as instances of publicly undressing the colonial subject, the woman is still not in
demure poses, averting her eyes away flom the spectator in recognition of the patriarchal
forces evaluating her. Her eyes are, on the other hand, embodiments of a power of their
own, the eroticism serving to challenge male viewers. These photographs disable the
voyeuristic viewer’s power to gaze and then walk away flom the photograph with
supreme satisfaction, under the illusion that he has been in control of the act of viewing,
controlling any erotic feelings produced through the process of the gaze. Cameron
unravels this illusion of power by assigning the woman model a gaze that is preoccupied
and outside the grasp of the viewer. Cameron makes visual consumers of her women
models when they daringly engage in this act of looking and take in sights only reserved
for the male gaze. So however much Cameron’s native woman seems to be objectified
and subjected to the European gaze, the photographs are not without their disruptive

tensions. The eroticism acts to enable the native woman, in a strange fashion. It does not

20

strip the native woman of agency but actually interrogates the sexual prudery of the
European at this time. While such a representation highlighting nakedness seems to
signal the physical and cultural divide between the colonizer and the colonized, these
depictions also show Cameron’s rejection of certain Victorian demands, interrogating
Englishness itself. Cameron perhaps challenges the male prerogative of representing
nudity during the Victorian era by incorporating nakedness into her images.

Yet it is remarkable how Cameron herself realizes to a certain extent that the gaze
is “a masculine prerogative, with woman positioned as the object of the voyeur’s
scrutiny’ ’(Smith 55). As the woman’s body is inevitably coded as erotic, Cameron’s
choice to sexualize it is bound to obj ectify the woman. It seems as if Cameron in a subtle
fashion aestheticises the pictures by adopting strategies used by eminent Victorian artists
such as Frederick Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema who were experimenting with
the nude while grounding their work in the neo-classical mode. Leighton’s Venus
Disrobing for the bath (1866-7) and Alma-Tadema’s A Sculptor ’5 Model (1877) are both
depictions of the nude in classical style. As Smith points out, the classical style and
subject matter sanctioned the nude, justifying it as art.

Cameron surely would have been aware of the debate surrounding the nude and
how certain artists like Leighton negotiated their work around such heated topics. She
herself seems to adopt such strategies especially when depicting the dress of the Sri
Lankan women. Her fascination with the sari becomes obvious when she seductively uses
it to cast the women as almost semi-draped models. Indrani Sen demonstrates how the
sexually titillating sari had been “culturally inscribed as a sensual mode of dress”(5 7) by

the English.21 By lingering on the sari, Cameron unravels western notions of modesty and

21

irnmodesty by almost exalting the sari to evoke the classical. The folds of the sari in
figure 2 evoke the technique of Leighton and Ahna-Tadema where “drapery falls in
broad, weighty folds which richly swathe the whole body’ ’(Barrow 51).22 Such artistic
maneuvering in order to depict nudity shows that Cameron was invested in these Sri
Lankan works as aesthetic photographs.

The fact that Cameron chose to evoke one woman figure in these photographs
fiuther illustrates Cameron’s regard for the Sri Lankan woman model. It is as if Cameron
sees artistic potential in this figure and seems to be dissatisfied with only a single facet of
that image. The native woman is not an ethnological exhibit who is observed as evidence
of a particular ethnic group but is an individual who has caught Cameron’s avid interest.
She becomes a constant reminder of Cameron’s detailed studies of her favorite niece,
Julia Jackson, for whom she had a great regard. Cameron’s varied profiles of Jackson
show the photographer’s fascination with her model. As Violet Hamilton notes, Julia
Jackson was one of the few individuals Cameron never chose to cast as a legendary or
allegorical figure. Hamilton goes on to add that she was “one of the few women whom
Cameron portrayed as herself (without association to archetypes)”(38). Likewise, the
native model ceases to be just another woman encountered in the colonies. Instead, she
becomes a woman Cameron looks at with pleasure, who commands sufficient allure to
spur this woman photographer to focus on the Sri Lankan’s figure, seriously challenging
any previous arguments that Cameron did not view her natives as likely models.

Further, Cameron’s use of nudity does not strip the Sri Lankan woman of
individuality. Linda Nochlin observes that “the very term “erotic art” is understood to

imply the specification ‘erotic-for-men”’(9) and that man is ultimately not just the subject

22

but also the customer for all erotic products. In this instance, her argument that “there
seems to be no conceivable outlet for the expression of women’s viewpoints in nineteenth
century art, even in the reahn of pure fantasy” could be interrogated by Cameron’s
portrayal of the native woman. Cameron seems to find that very outlet in the colonies
when she eroticizes the native bodies. In England, Cameron is compelled to be cautious
and act out the role of the respectable artist cum mother when she clearly keeps away
flom the nude. Lukitsh remarks that “when women artists did not have access to the nude
model for life-study classes, the child was Cameron’s only opportunity to photograph the
human body/’(Cameron 12). But what is significant is not that Cameron sexualizes the
native bodies but that she does so in a fashion that challenges the male gaze.

The passivity fundamental to the nude, emerging out of the notion of the “artist as
sexually dominant creator: man-the artist-fashioning flom the inert matter an ideal erotic
object for himself, a woman out to the very pattern of his desires”(Nochlin 15), is
problematized in Cameron’s pictures, signifying her ambivalence towards the native.
Connolly posits two kinds of erotic images, one in the form of a “potential amatory
exchange between the depicted and the spectator” or the imaginative encounters that
become erotic precisely because the women elude the “imagination’s hot embrace” (17).
Both of these possibilities are complicated by Cameron to a certain extent by assigning an
active role to the native woman model. In fig. 1, the native is inaccessible precisely
because of her gaze. She does not shyly look away flom the viewer but deflects his gaze
by guiding his eyes towards the direction of her look, a space he cannot even
imaginatively penetrate. She is not totally contained in the photographic space as she is

hgiven a look that moves beyond the flame. By looking away in to the distance, she

23

creates a visual space for herself in the process, which is beyond the sight of the
spectator. Thus she disrupts the image of herself as the passive obj ect and in turn
flustrates her viewer as she has refilsed to cooperate with him and allow him uninhibited
sexual access to visual gratification of her body. He is compelled to locate his voyeuristic
gaze on a visual space that guarantees him no access, thus nullifying his gaze altogether.
Then the focus of the photograph comes to center on the viewer’s unease rather than the
half-clothed woman model’s body. Hence roles reverse, as the spectator becomes the
object.

So Cameron dismantles the binary between the active viewer and the passive
object, thereby thwarting the desires of the west to subdue the native. The evading look
of the native subject does not automatically imply passivity. On the contrary such a look
is more a detached gaze while the photographic subject herself becomes an active ‘
participant in this process of looking as a result of the intimacy between the photographer
and the native woman. In the case of Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs, while the
spectator tries to subject the native to his gaze, she is gazing at another object
inaccessible to the viewer. She seems to be totally detached flom the process of taking a
picture, thus eluding the control of the camera in obj ectifying her. She also conflonts and
interrogates the viewer by not only evading the camera but also gazing at this other object
far removed flom the sight of the viewer and even flom the immediate vicinity of the
photographer. Here, the object of the gaze-and the subject of the photograph- becomes
the viewer in turn with the power to look, not by conflonting the camera and in turn the
viewer but by engaging with another object away flom the grasp of the viewer, thus

challenging his power to gaze. Therefore the object of the male gaze-the native woman-

24

is displaced, as there is no sole viewing object or an exclusive viewer. Cameron maps out
alternative obj ects/spaces that are not within the command of the spectator standing
outside of the flame. In this process, she assigns a spectatorial position to her native
subject apparently caught within the flame, thus interrupting the whole flarnework of the
viewer flaunting masculine control with the power to look and the passive feminized
subject who can only be looked upon. Consequently she breaks the unity of the
photographer’s gaze (which is considered to be complicit with the spectator’s gaze) and
that of the spectator.

The woman (F ig.1) is also not depicted as delicate and flagile although her partial
nakedness makes her vulnerable to the gaze of the viewer. Moreover Cameron’s
technique of blurring the distinction between the background and the model actually
speaks of a sense of mystery and unavailability. She does not become the locus of the
fantasies of the European gaze specifically because she commands a power that is
crystallized in her refusal to aesthetically please the European gaze. Perhaps the
sensuality embedded in these photographs is unwelcome not because it is not visually
pleasing but because it cannot be harnessed and hence controlled. While the eroticism
does not incapacitate the native, making her compliant and demure, it speaks more of this
intimacy between the subject and the photographer. Cameron does not view her model as
a client would with the intention to possess but rather sees her as an autonomous
individual. The woman model is not monopolized into satisfying the fantasies of the
spectator. Cameron makes no such allowances when she threatens to disrupt the pleasure
of viewing the spectator has so far taken for granted. In this respect, Cameron’s affinity

for her model becomes visible.

25

For instance, fig.1 demonstrates this intimacy well. The woman is not flozen
within the photographic space, forced into interaction with the voyeuristic gaze of the
spectator but is staged so as to convey the impression that she has the ability to move
away flom the retarding gaze whenever she wishes by commanding her own gaze. Such
license granted to the native is curiously empowering. It speaks more of an individuality
than of a stereotype of either the sexually promiscuous native woman- who poses a threat
to the European male who finds her attractive but repulsive at the same time- or the
submissive dependent female. Further, the photographer’s gaze under which the woman’s
gaze operates does not negate the native woman’s look, thus opening up spaces of
intimacy between the photographer and the object of the photograph. Such fissures
undermine the notion of the photographer as an owner of the subject he depicts and hence
commands. The photographer does not collaborate with the spectator in these
photographs. These novel spaces disclose alternative modes of visualizing the
relationship between the photographer and subject.

Such complexity embedded in the photograph can only be explained through the
triangulated relationship between the photographer, the native woman model and the
male gaze. Cameron problematizes the inevitable identification/collaboration between the
photographer and the spectator by clearly assuming the role of the photographer but not
that of the spectator. Thus, the woman model's refirsal to meet the viewer's gaze is not a
sign of her passivity. It is as if the viewer almost does not exist, an individual whose
masterly eye sums up the object he owns. The Sri Lankan woman is almost oblivious to
the presence of the spectator because she need not fashion herself according to his

dictates. In this sense, she is not confined within the photographic space because

26

Cameron fashions other sites that the woman model can inhabit without necessary
intrusion by the spectator. The native is not being observed by the woman photographer
and therefore is not subject to surveillance where she must either accept or refuse the
male viewer's inviting gaze.

In this picture, the light and dark play dramatically across her face but the
brightness of her gaze speaks of her refusal to be an inanimate object. But while the
lighting tries to reveal, it also tries to hide. For example, in fig.2, by actually not
differentiating between the woman’s clothes and the background of vines and leaves,
Cameron lets the native woman almost blend into her backdrop. She is made to almost
twine around the leaves, the color of the vines, the sari and her bare flesh being similar.
One hand actually disappears into the hedge while the other emerges flom the vine. In
this instance, one cannot distinguish between the hand and the leaf, if not for the jutting
out of the index finger and the thumb. Likewise, her hair becomes a part of a bunch of
leaves as it is difficult to discern which is what. Even the way her lower body vanishes
into the darkness serves to highlight this tendency of blurring the forms of her body and
allowing her to disappear into the flame. The result is that she is inaccessible to the
spectator who seeks his own sexual empowerment through the imaginary possession of
the object. What is quite striking and somewhat odd is Cameron’s wish to not totally
envelope the woman in vine leaves and her decision to leave one portion of the backdrop
bare. This blank space is highlighted by the way the bamboo shoots spring upward,
focusing on the bare background right above. While it definitely emphasizes and almost
blends in with her bare back, it also speaks of Cameron’s wish to hint at another visual

space beyond the flame. This space speaks of another reality flom which this native

27

woman emerges. Thus she is not literally fixed in space and time in terms of the
photographic flame. It attributes a sense of fleedom to the woman. It hints at a past as
well as a future. In other words, she has an identity of her own, and therefore is in no
need of being assigned one. Her assured stride across the flame speaks of her confidence
of that power.

Even in fig.3, while the picture does reveal, it also blurs the obvious. Once again,
the woman blends into the backdrop. She seems to be seated against the hedge and almost
merges with the leaves that surround her. There is no distinct difference between the
plants and the shades of the sari that she wears. Her sari blends in with the color of the
leaves whereas her bared flesh takes on the hue of the bamboo shoots. One arm seems to
appear out of the hedge whereas one disappears into the leaves. Her hair falls down her
back but vanishes flom the eye of the viewer after a certain point. In addition, the fact
that the native woman is not clearly cut off flom the picture adds to this elusive quality,
leaving the spectator in disarray.

This photograph of the Kalutara woman is clearly different flom Cameron’s
English women who are placed in gardens. These European models are clearly captured
within the photographic flame, although in a different manner. Their eyes suggest pain
and sorrow, hinting at the tragic. On the other hand, the almost impassive expression on
the Sri Lankan woman’s face hints at a sense of defiance. While the other two English
women models almost appeal to the viewer to share in their experience, this picture
clearly makes no attempt at an emotional connection between viewer and subject, thus
breaking down the dominance of the gaze. This actually serves to empower this portrait

because although the woman seems to be captured and her body on display, it still speaks

28

of a power that the viewer cannot participate in. Therefore, although the compressed
visual space guides the viewer to exclusively gaze at her body, it still ceases to be
pleasurable as her eyes do not sanction or appeal to such action.

Thus Cameron’s lays claim to a distinct gaze as she simultaneously assigns her
native model her own look. Yet the dilemma is whether Cameron can ever position
herself as a spectator in the first place, even in terms of an artist, let alone adopt either a
male gaze or a woman’s look. As Griselda Pollock points out, while women came to be
seen predominantly in their reproductive roles, the artist was defined as “anti-domestic”,
the result being this contradiction between the “ideological identities of the artist and
woman”(49). Therefore, the woman artist must first resolve this inherent contradiction
within herself whereby she becomes both passive as well as active. In this respect,
Cameron literally has access to command a male gaze as a photographer because she has
the power to “capture” women within her lenses. Yet Cameron questions the one-
directional male gaze by refusing to obj ectify the woman, at least wholeheartedly.

Indira Ghose discusses how a woman’s gaze is flactured, a “notion of subjectivity
as shifting and contradictory’ ’(60). At first, Cameron seems to hold such a flactured gaze,
where she is not in absolute command of either the male gaze or the imperial one. She
cannot assume the privileged status of the spectator or voyeur as “women were after all
both observer and observed. . .subj ect to the regulatory gazes of their own patriarchal
society’ ’(Ghose 60). But Cameron cannot escape being subject to the scrutinizing gaze of
the patriarchal society monitoring her every action as a white woman. She becomes
doubly surveilled as a threatening force, being a woman as well as a woman with colonial

affiliations who does not fall into the category of the helpless decorative white woman.

29

Then the question is whether Cameron can ever adopt a woman’s look to picture the Sri
Lankans. Laura Mulvey elaborates on the gaze of the female spectator who constantly
vacillates between a male perspective (engaging in the pleasures of voyeurism) and the
female perspective, engaging in a narcissistic identification with the woman depicted.
Cameron’s Sri Lankan pictures invite such an analysis, especially when Cameron tries to
objectify the woman model adopting the male gaze but at the same time begins to relate
to her native by identifying with the Sri Lankan woman. Yet Cameron is also essentially
different in that she cannot comfortably oscillate between the two points of view, as she
does not occupy either position with authority and confidence.

Ghose aptly points out, “what needs to be scrutinized is the site flom which
women gaze, that is the position of power in which they are located”(9). Cameron is
surely not the typical woman in the colonies, especially with her privileged but limited
access to hold the male gaze. But she is not the quintessential white woman in the colony
either, whose gaze cannot be differentiated flom the act of gazing in an imperialist
fashion. Her superior position to her photographic subject (the native) in terms of race
assigns her an imperial gaze. But she cannot be relegated to the category of the usual
white woman traveler/photographer in the colonies, as she herself is no stranger to the
Indian subcontinent. Cameron seems to occupy a somewhat dubious position in the
colonies, especially considering the status of Anglo-Indians amongst Victorian society.
Hence, her Anglo-Indian origins deny her an untainted white woman’s look.

This predicament where Cameron is denied footing to access any gaze with
conviction situates her in a peculiar position as a woman with undesirable racial

affiliations whose gaze is constantly being policed by her male counterparts. Cameron

3O

attempts to make her gaze partially that of the colonized, the result being that the native
woman need not return the gaze of the white photographer as there is no tension between
the two. This bond is obvious through the self-confidence she grants her native woman, a
self-confidence Cameron partially holds emanating flom her status as a professional
woman photographer. This singular position grants her a different gaze, which actually
creates an intimacy between the subject and the photographer. This is not an intimacy
enacted between a desiring male spectator and a willing female subject where the latter
must succumb to the impositions of the former. Cameron redefines intimacy to an extent
when she relinquishes her hold on the woman model and ceases to become watchful over
her subject by letting the native woman assume her own look.

Jackie Stacey argues against Mulvey’s theoretical position of the gaze by raising
the question of the pleasures of the female spectator. She discusses the possible
fascination with the other woman which is “neither purely identification with the other
woman, nor desire for her in the strictly erotic sense of the word. It is a desire to see, to
know, to become more like an idealized feminine other’ ’(1 15). Cameron seems to relate
to the Sri Lankan pictures in such an unpossessive manner. The somewhat taut posture
with the head held stiff is an indication that the woman commands power over herself.
Joanne Lukitsh in her discussion of Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs in “Simply
Pictures of Peasants: Artistry, Authorship and Ideology in Julia Margaret Cameron’s
Photography in Sri Lanka, 1875-1879” sees similar confidence in the figure of the “half-
length portrait of woman”. Lukitsh observes that the “low camera angle gives stature to
her presence, even as this representation of her self-possession is undermined by the stiff

gesture of the fingers of her hand”(5). She observes that Cameron is employing “mixed

31

aesthetic modes” or “incompatible visual codes”(5) in her Sri Lankan images when her
“authority as a woman colonizer over the colonized subject she represented was partial
and the Sri Lankan woman model’s look evidence of a resistance to it”(5). Lukitsh
registers such ambivalence in the representation of the Sri Lankan as evidence of
Cameron’s incomplete authority over the native. Yet this leads the discussion away flom
a possible intimacy between the photographer and the photographic object, which is a
central component in Cameron’s Sri Lankan prints.

Of course Cameron seeks to differentiate herself flom the native woman
somewhat by continuously contradicting her own gaze, viewing the native as inferior,
evident in her attempts to obj ectify these women slightly. The continual tension in
Cameron, where she seems to obj ectify the native by stripping away agency flom her but
simultaneously complicates such a venture by empowering the Sri Lankan woman can
only be understood by reflecting on Cameron’s own attitude to the colony itself.
Although flom a privileged background, Cameron truly blossomed not in India where she
spent her first 32 years but in England. Her photographic successes were all enacted on
English soil with access to exhibitions and recognition in the field of photography. Thus
the decision to once again leave for the colonies would have perhaps been a disheartening
one for Cameron.23 The biographies suggest that the departure was purely for Charles’
sake, although Cameron indicates in several places that it was an opportunity to be with
her sons. Giving up her work, fiiends and familiar surroundings would have then been a
difficult decision for Cameron, which perhaps fostered a sense of hostility to the colonies.

A sense of distaste towards the colonies, especially India would have been

intensified by her own unusual looks, which set her apart flom her family noted for their

32

 

good looks. After all, her mother was considered a beauty and so were her sisters.
Hopkinson makes an interesting remark, that Cameron “remained all her life devoted to
the Indian subcontinent although her olive complexion and dark hair need not denote the
mixed blood that has been sometimes ascribed to her’ ’(34). This is intriguing, especially
when considering certain racial theories that were in circulation at this time?" If
Cameron’s olive skin was a- constant reminder of the debilitating effects of the climate,
and she hints at such racial degeneration (something Victorian society would have found
conspicuous enough), her rejection of any colonial affiliation would be understandable,
manifest in her photography of the native. This might have contributed to a possible
resentment against her own upbringing in the colonies, which would have led her to
exhibit photographs of individuals such as Edward John Eyre.25 Perhaps she seems to
highlight certain differences to establish and confirm her own racial self. Cameron after
all tries to distance herself flom the native woman by depicting the Sri Lankan as
sensuous and sexual, qualities that the Victorian England only associated with working
class prostitutes.

But what is never taken into account is that Cameron perhaps needed to declare
her English affiliations whilst in England, especially as she was a woman flom the
colonies.26 Therefore, Cameron’s decision to select particular pictures when she does
cannot be judged without looking into her own vulnerable position as a woman who
probably needed to exhibit the portraits of famous men at the time to gain recognition and
attention. So while Cameron seemingly rejects her colonial ties while in England, she
appears to identify with the native while in Sri Lanka, this tension being apparent in her

photographs of the Sri Lankans. She constantly tries to disrupt the binaries established by

33

English women in the colonies by trying to align herself with the native manifest in her
social behavior to the native as well as her depiction of the native through photography.
In other words, an alien “other” does not exist in terms of Cameron’s relationship to the
colonies. This is suggested in part in her blatant adoption of Indian dress.27 Nupur
Chaudhuri elucidates how the Anglo Indians adopted a mode of racial exclusiveness and
rejected “Indian objects in their colonial homes and refused Indian dishes in their
diets”(232) and would not wear Indian dress. So while the memsahibs were refusing
curry and Indian attire to maintain the cultural divide between the ruler and the ruled,
Cameron’s wish to embrace such Indian dresses by adopting them in various ways while
in the colonies as well as in England as well articulates her wish to break down those
barriers between the colonizer and the colonized.

Hence there is a simultaneous acceptance and denial of connections to the
colonies that is reflected in Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs where she seems to strip
the native models of agency but only to accord them power consequently. The fact that
she chooses to depict the native in a manner that is both enabling and disabling perhaps
reflects her own flagile position as a woman, who must negotiate a space for herself
between empowerment and disempowerrnent. After all, not only was Cameron a woman
affiliated with the colonies, but also just a woman in the colonies, although being
European elevated her to a position of power over the colonized. Cameron was clearly
dependent on her sons for financial assistance, and Hopkinson discusses how in one
instance, she was disappointed with her son Ewen’s decision concerning the allocation of
money. Cameron, then, possibly sees herself as marginalized and powerless, not only in

Victorian society, being somewhat of an outsider, but also in the colonies where

34

European women did not have the same access to photograph the colonial body as
European men did. Although such constraints were partly due to the Indian Mutiny of
1857 28, these racial tensions would have canied south to colonial Sri Lanka where the
dusky native might have instilled fear in the English. The 1848 rebellion in Sri Lanka did
have an impact on the British consciousness when the Kandyan peasants revolted against
the British regime, which left many Singhalese natives slaughtered by the British
officials. Therefore the set of conventions that a white woman had to submit to in India
would have restricted Cameron’s movements in Sri Lanka as well although Sri Lanka
never became a space ridden with such intense racial anxiety. Cameron is not an agent
but an object, almost as powerless as her Sri Lankan woman model is, as an imperial
subject. Then, such a predicament where Cameron is not entirely in command of her
location in Sri Lanka introduces the idea that by looking at the “other”, she was actually
looking at her own self. 29Therefore just as she carves a niche for her native model within
the photographic space in several ways, Cameron herself seems to try to bargain such a
space that allows her to express her own conflicting identity.

Cameron then is situated in a peculiar position. She is not simply a woman
brandishing a camera, which only males have handled so far in the colonies. She
embodies in herself the tag of a professional photographer, a career which had been set
aside for men. Romita Ray points out that for most British women in the subcontinent,
“sketching and painting were confined to genteel pastimes undertaken in privacy”
although “a simple hobby to keep the eye and hand occupied proved to be an agreeable

solution for adjusting to a foreign landscape”(89). Cameron’s standing in terms of

35

photography makes her a misfit amongst other women who were dabbling in such
projects merely to while away the time.

Thus, Cameron’s portraits emerge out of certain anxieties that are embedded in
Cameron herself. She cannot simply be categorized as a colonial photographer especially
because there are no indications on her part either to make photography 3 commercial
venture or to send out her portraits for display. Moreover, Cameron cannot maintain the
distance necessary between the colonial photographer and the native subject as she
herself constantly shifts ground flom the position of photographer to that of the native.
Her Sri Lankan portraits clearly demonstrate her struggle to distance herself flom the
native amidst her strong desire to identify with the woman and therefore not picture her at
all in the sense of a detached photographer. Since Cameron inhabits somewhat of an in-
between space, she is unable to retain the distinction between her own self and the
“other”. This threatens to disrupt her photographs, in which the photographic subject -the
native- shifts back and forth flom agency to powerlessness. For Cameron to visualize the
native as the “other’ is indeed a difficult task as she is always already “othered” in this
Victorian discourse of difference. Cameron does not occupy a stable self in order to
picture the native.

Yet Cameron makes amends by somehow attempting to allocate different viewing
positions to her native model and experimenting with spaces within the photograph to
locate the woman model. Therefore the native woman’s need for her own space to
articulate her own subjectivity within the photographic space becomes emblematic of
Cameron’s own desire for such a site of expression. But what is crucial to the

understanding of Cameron’s location is the site of Sri Lanka itself. Sri Lanka, or British

36

Ceylon, occupies an altogether different space as far as the colonial imaginary is
concerned. Notwithstanding the fact that British India’s mere size would have
overshadowed her neighbor, Sri Lanka still played her part as a major supplier of tea and
coffee to her imperial masters. But what is more interesting is that Sri Lanka became a
point of transition for many travelers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
mainly a site for transit flom one destination to another, usually flom the center to the
periphery although Sri Lanka itself is a peripheral locale.3O It is then a liminal space or
an in-between space where Cameron finds herself in terms of location. Cameron herself
is the paradigmatic liminal subject who has no unified sense of a racial or a gendered
identity. She cannot be isolated solely as the conventional white woman in the colonies as
she is a professional photographer, and as far as her racial self is concerned, she occupies
an elusive space, having inhabited both Anglo-India as well as Victorian England, and
not belonging completely to either world. She has no distinct sense of home where she
actually belongs as she has been denied presence both in Anglo India and England. Then
such a liminal space as Sri Lanka allows Cameron to discard the banner of pro-empire
that she carries to continuously assert her ‘true’ Englishness. While Cameron
simultaneously is subject to a myriad of gazes in England and India, Sri Lanka provides
her an outlet where she can represent her own vision, although she can never escape
being constantly observed. Sri Lanka, to an extent, provides this woman photographer
with an alternative space to refine and redefine herself through her work.

Such an alternative space perhaps lets Cameron rethink a different perspective.
While standing on such a threshold transiting flom one state to another, Cameron

articulates a different outlook through her Sri Lankan photographs. There is a moment of

37

disjunction when the boundaries dissolve, when Cameron is ready to move into a
different viewpoint. Perhaps this very disjunction is the cause for the constant
arnbivalences in the photographs, where she tries to obj ectify her native subject. It is at
these severing moments that the male gaze colludes with the imperial gaze somewhat and
foreshadows the sari clad native woman who is depicted as “improperly” dressed
carrying traces of the savage, needing the civilizing presence of the white European male.
Yet this is not to disregard the fact that Cameron’s particular look, despite the
ambivalences, is a look that actually sees the native. While colonies were places for not
only the visual consumption but also the literal sexual consumption of native bodies, the
native woman’s body becomes the site of definition and affirmation of white male sexual
potency and superiority. Within such a context, both the male gaze and the imperial eye
cannot see as they are too preoccupied in their own subj ectivities. This is not to say that
their gaze is totally invalid. Only that their masterly gaze has overlooked the
photographic subject and has merely eyed the native woman in order to fashion their own
redemptive narrative. Yet Cameron’s look is far more complex, especially as any claim to
either an imperial or male gaze has always been denied to her.

Norman Bryson distinguishes between the gaze and the glance, arguing that the
gaze which is related to the term “regard” is “vigilant” and “masterful”. The gaze
indicates “an impatient pressure within vision, a persevering drive which looks outward
with mistrust’ and “actively seeks to confine what is always on the point of escaping or
slipping out of bounds”(93). Thus Bryson theorizes the gaze as leaning towards “violence
(penetrating, piercing and fixing)”(93). Such a phallic gaze is differentiated flom the

“glance” which is not as violent and probing as the gaze but is more “ a furtive or

38

sideways look”, not disembodied flom the act of viewing. The glance “does not seek to
bracket out the process of viewing, nor in its own techniques does it exclude the traces of
the body of labor”(94). It is clear that Cameron does not enact Bryson’s gaze as she
clearly tries to avoid casting her native woman as a passive victim, subject to the visual
thrust of the voyeur. Yet Cameron does not employ the glance either even though she
keeps away flom the “cold” and impersonal act of the gaze. Although her work is akin to
the glance where the process of viewing is not erased and she is involved in the act of
creation, evident in the manner in which she sees her own subjectivity through the native
model, Cameron’s photographic representations are clearly not attempts to view the Sri
Lankan. She is too deeply involved in her Sri Lankan woman to ever look at her.
Irnplicated in the act of looking is some sense of distance away flom the subject that
Cameron is clearly unable to maintain in her photographs.

But Cameron need not necessarily look in order to visualize her native woman
model. On the contrary, she experiences this process of seeing by never participating in
the act of looking. Perhaps this is why her photographs visualize the woman in
unconventional ways. For instance in fig.2, the woman’s head is cutoff flom the flame,
which is unusual. Such cropping in a photographic portrait is awkward and defies the
viewer’s expectations. It could be assessed as carelessness or an error on the part of the
photographer. Yet it also reflects an uncalculated process of seeing where some signs
miss the eye of the beholder. If Cameron did look in the sense of analyzing the object,
she would have incorporated such elements into her images. Yet seeing the native woman
would imply an interest in certain elements and not on others. Therefore, Cameron seems

to betray a fascination in the native woman’s sense of motion rather than in arresting her

39

entire figure on to the image. Cameron is not deliberately subjecting the woman to a
debilitating gaze by fixing her body on to the plane of the photograph. The woman’s
body is not dissected on the photographic surface by a surgical eye. Instead certain things
are left outside of the purview of the picture, apparently not seized by the photograph.
The result is proximity between the photographer and the Sri Lankan woman. Further,
seeing also diverts power away flom the one who looks to the one who is the object of
that look. Whereas the gaze/ glance suggest visual power embodied in the individual who
directs his eye towards the object, seeing implies a shared sense of power. It is a shared
activity where more power lies in the object, which permits the act of seeing. It is some
element in the object itself that drags the eye and consents to the act of seeing. Thus
seeing becomes more reliable as it has almost occurred by accident.

Thus Cameron’s most complex work seems to have taken place in the colonies
after all although many biographies have suggested otherwise. Her peculiar positionality
helps Cameron formulate a series of photographs where she demonstrates unpossessive
intimacy towards her native. This affirms that Cameron never becomes merely a
spectator. She simply cannot as she is unable to step back and look at the native. She is
drawn to the native, which disrupts any attempt to gaze at the woman model, and reveals
a new mode of visualizing the Sri Lankan. Her Sri Lankan prints reveal Cameron
invoking the native and attempting to perhaps explore the many facets to her figure. As
mentioned before, this introduces the idea that Cameron need not look at all in order to
picture the native. Such a series of photographs of English women came out of a long
standing relationship between Cameron and the model. Yet this cannot be sirnplistically

discerned as Cameron’s fascination with the Sri Lankan woman. The Sri Lankan pictures

40

reveal a complexity of her subject that Cameron was perhaps trying to perceive herself.
The multiple images of the Sri Lankan suggest a depth in the colonial subject that
hitherto had been unacknowledged by many a colonial photographer. While colonial
subjects were considered simplistic objects easily identified, categorized and classified,
Cameron sees plurality in the woman that she cannot grasp as easily. It is almost as if the
Sri Lankan woman cannot be mapped onto a photograph in just one shot to elicit her
character. It is significant that Cameron pictures the woman in different poses and
settings, in and out of the studio. For instance, fig.1 portrays the Sri Lankan sitter gazing
into the distance, and the left side of her face is exposed to the viewer along with her eyes
in order to create an intense effect. Fig.3 of the “Ceylonese woman, Kalutara” features
the native completely turned away flom the camera. Fig.2 allows movement to the model,
where her face is not clearly discernible but the body is. It is as if Cameron rotates the
woman assigning her the power of the gaze and fleedom of movement each time, yet
dissatisfied with each attempt. This intertextual relationship between the photographs
shows how Cameron glimpses the many possibilities of seeing this woman. It seems as if
each time Cameron sees the model, she sees a different aspect of the Sri Lankan she
wishes to represent. Cameron persists in attempting to fathom what she sees instead of
using the image to aid her view of herself. She sees limitations in showing the native
woman as a flozen object and invites the eye to see the intricacy in these photographs.
The tensions arise when she herself gets caught in a web of gazes -male, imperial and her
own shifting gaze that surfaces in order to escape the patriarchal gazes -resulting in

ambivalence.

41

Endnotes

1 For one of the very few discussions on Cameron’s Sri Lankan photographs, see Joanne
Lukitsh, “Simply Pictures of Peasants”: Artistry, Authorship and Ideology in Julia
Margaret Cameron’s Photography in Sri Lanka, 1875-1879”

2 For a survey of conventions see Joanne Lukitsh, Julia Margaretgameron

3 Violet Hamilton, 41.

4 Reproduced in Lukitsh, Cameron 71.

5 For a discussion of measures adopted to photograph the colonial body, see Anne
Maxwell, 38-59.

6 For a discussion on how certain natives like aboriginal women were forced to pose
naked, see Maxwell, 140.

7 Lukitsh, Cameron 121.

8 Gemsheim, 160.

9 For a more extensive discussion on photographers of 19‘h-century Ceylon see

Raheem and Thome, 9-41.

'0 Raheem and Thome state that photographs of W.L.H. Skeen were acclaimed at
international exhibitions and that “Skeen was not the only photographer who attained
international status; photographers like Cave and Andree too achieved recognition and
acceptance”(22).

1' Gemsheim notes how Cameron competed with her contemporaries at exhibitions and
Brian Hill points out that “Julia was always eager to get her work shown to the public in
any photographic exhibition”(126).

'2 Marianne North, 314.

42

13 See a discussion of this in James R. Ryan, 45-98.

M Raheem and Thome, 17.

'5 Falcon and Raheem, 20.

‘6 See P de Silva, 2.

'7 In many respects, Cameron’s depictions of the English women cannot be seen as
satisfactory. Hopkinson regards the “heavenly” purity of the English models as the only
means at hand for Cameron to empower the women in any way: “fantasy characters like
these paradoxically allowed female models greater scope for individual expression than
they had in being themselves”(l6). While Cameron’s famous men are rarely reconfigured
as mythical or allegorical figures, her fair women can hardly pose as themselves. Nancy
Armstrong argues that the “semi-transparent otherworldliness” apparent in Cameron’s
English women hints at an interiority: “transparency in a woman is the sign of
individualism, the transformation of her body into a sign of the moral and emotional
qualities contained within that body”(112). Yet the very need for transformation into
exalted figures implies that they lack autonomy as individuals. Their otherworldliness not
only disables them but also purges them of agency and desire. Hopkinson’s observation
that these women are depicted as “alien to the worlds of power, politics and
intellect”(110) further reinforces the view that they are far flom autonomous individuals.
While the European women seem to be confined in their mystical, unreal attire, the Sri
Lankan woman is less restricted in that she poses in her own dress, the sari.

18 Gordon Baldwin, Roger Fenton: Pasha; and BM (Los Angeles: Getty Museum
Studies on Art, 1996) 87.

19 Henry W. Cave, 86.

43

20 Griselda Pollock argues that by the nineteenth century, women were securely confined
to a domestic sphere, and that “femininity was exclusively domestic and matemal”(48).
She shows how “the category woman was limited to those familial positions” and when
women transgressed those clearly defined spaces, they “were penalized for it and treated
as unnatural, unwomanly and unsexed”(48).

2’ Sen argues that this ‘immodest garment’ was “denigrated for its transparency and
invoked as a signifier of ‘native’ female libidousness as well as the sensual moorings of
Indian culture”(5 7).

22 Most of Leighton’s and his contemporary Tadema’s work employs classical rippling
drapery. For instance in Leighton’s Flaming June (1895) “the glowing diaphonous
draperies draw attention to the body beneath, revealing the breast and thigh, and
heightening the erotic impact”(Barringer XX). Even Leighton’s earlier drawings such as
Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon (1869) and Greek Girls picking up Pebbles by the
Sea (1871) involve a classical style that perhaps was noted by Cameron.

23 Gemsheim notes how Cameron was in the midst of illustrating Tennyson’s “Idylls of
the King” when the Carnerons suddenly left for the colonies. Hopkinson explores
Cameron’s reaction to relocating in Ceylon and concludes that Cameron’s feelings were
mixed, being somewhat caught between the need to reunite with her sons in Ceylon and
keeping close ties to her fliends at Freshwater. Hopkinson states that Cameron was at the
“height of her professional success”(79) when her husband’s health failed which
compelled the family to go back to the East.

2" Ann Laura Stoler elaborates on these real or imagined concerns over “racial

surviva ”(355) and “degeneracy”(355). Stoler describes this fear surrounding the physical

44

and moral degeneration and miscegenation of the White European race in the colonies
where tropical climates were said to cause low fertility, permanent sterility amongst the
European races. According to Stoler, such fears of physical and sexual contamination
were rampant, and hill stations were actually a means of seclusion, providing European
like environments.
25 See Jeff Rosen, 158-187. In this article, he actually argues that Cameron utilized some
of her photographs of individuals such as Edward John Eyre and Thomas Carlyle
“overtly to affirm both the justness and justice of British imperialism”(158) during
controversial times although these photographs were embedded with inconsistencies and
anxieties. Rosen discusses Cameron’s “celebration of the ‘heroic’ members of the Eyre
defense Committee”(159) and her pictures of the Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia as a sign
of her endorsement of harsh actions taken in the colonies, in spite of the debate in
England about Eyre’s tactics. Eyre’s brutal suppression of the rebellion in Jamaica was
criticized by many including the “Jamaica Committee”. Yet some supported Eyre,
especially people like Carlyle whose photographs Cameron exhibited boldly in 1868.
Rosen sees Cameron’s move to exhibit Eyre and Carlyle along with her other allegorical
photographs as testimony of her need to depict Eyre as heroic. Thus the fact that she
shared the sentiments of Carlyle that the “Almighty Maker has appointed the [black] to
be a servant”( 164) and Eyre’s belief that “the negroes form a low state of civilization”
and “could not properly be dealt with in the same manner as the peasantry of a European
Country”(Rosen 165) introduce this idea that Cameron perhaps did not have much regard
for the “other” she encountered in the colonies. Also See Julia Margaret Cameron,

“Annals of My Glass House, 15. In this, Cameron’s attitude to the colonies becomes

45

evident in her account of her various correspondences with Sir John Herschel. She writes
once in a letter, “I was then residing in Calcutta, and scientific discoveries sent to that
then benighted land were water to the parched lips of the starved” (15, my emphasis).

26 Anne Maxwell develops Stoler’s ideas further and elaborates that colonial settlers who
were “morally suspect” were “forced to imitate the centre’s own representational
practices if they wanted to be accepted as ‘true’ Europeans”(4).

2’ H0pkinson says that “even in the most ordinary circumstances her habit of wearing
numerous skirts, swathed about with lace mantillas and oriental shawls, struck many
observers as, at least, unusual”(76). Even Marianne North observes Cameron’s dress: “the
lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most
refreshing”(3 14).

28 See a discussion of the constraints placed by the Indian mutiny in Sinha, 98-119.

29 See Ghose,15.

’0 Raheem and Thome mention “Ceylon’s geographical location and the vital role it
played in the Indian Ocean trade routes”(22) during the nineteenth century: “In the years
before air travel, virtually every passenger plying between Europe and Asia (and also
Australia) had to pass through the ports of Galle or Colombo before continuing their

journey’ ’(22).

46

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