Fruits of the Spirits-Images of Mother and Child in Julia Margaret Cameron's Photographic Works

• Main Authors: Min-Shuan Yang, 楊旻軒
• Other Authors: Ming-Tsuey Ni
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/44ss2t

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 藝術與造形設計學系碩士班 === 102 === The thesis is a study on the photographic images of mother and child by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), a famous Victorian photographer. Cameron created series of atypical images of mother and child to question the constructed ideal motherhood and challenge the domestic and moral duties imposed on women of her time. Cameron apparently used the soft focus to subvert the clear focus of the mainstream photography and altered the patriarchal standard of visual representation. In fact, this blur effect has its spiritual linkage: between photography and pictures, viewers and the pictures, mother and child. In the series Fruits of The Spirit (1864) and those images of mother and child deriving from the series, Cameron cleverly appropriated traditional religious iconography as themes that were acceptable to the Victorian viewers. Through dramatic lighting and soft focus lens, Cameron changed the referent and significance of her images. However, her works are not just a form of innovation or transformation of iconographic meanings, they also transmit the deeply hidden maternal desire. Intensive maternal gaze in Cameron’s photographs of mother and child makes the viewer feel the connection and coexistence between the mother and child and conveys the mother’s strong desire to own the child again. For Cameron, photography is a medium that can display motherhood, enables her to re-experience the pleasure of being a mother. Cameron's images of mother and child present another way to interpret motherhood. Her photographic works create a pictorial space belonging to the maternity, and brings back to the visual representation the relationship between mother and child that has been excluded from the symbolic order. They also establish the vertical links between mother and child, reconstructing the maternal genealogy that belongs to the feminine.