"To keep is not the same thing as to keep alive": Anne Boyer on Julia Margaret Cameron for SFMOMA

New at the San Francisco Museum of Art's Open Space: Anne Boyer--author of a number of works of poetry and the forthcoming novel JOAN, and assistant professor of the liberal arts at the Kansas City Art Institute--has done her part for poets' art writing in her essay about photographer Julia Margaret Cameron's My Grandchild, Archie Cameron, Aged Two Years, Three Months, 1865. She writes:

Neither the inspecting eye of a mother nor a camera can, despite their attempts, fix the state of the infant. As life or death is not certain in a photo of a sleeping child, so it is that photos themselves—at least as documents of something like reality—are not certain. Although there is no doctoring of the image of the lone sleeping boy, the other two photos of Archie were manipulated by Cameron. No motherly figure actually looked down at the sleeping or play-dead Archie during a photo shoot—not in mourning, not in devotion. Archie slept; Cameron took a photo. Later, she took separate photos of the veiled model, Mary Hillier, and superimposed these images to suggest a maternal relation to Archie.

This is Cameron’s fiction that the sleeping infant is a dead infant or a dying infant and that the gaze of the woman who watches him is the maternal gaze. What Cameron photographed, primarily, was not any kind of public reality, but instead, a kind of hyper-private, luminous world, framed in allegory, drawing from the form of the tableau vivant. Women and children were at her world’s center, and they were the stuff of life, death, desire, and beauty—fully heroic—while the men, except for the poets or poet-like geniuses, existed in the periphery. Everything is figure; almost nothing is ground. All action is affectionate relation—round lips kissing, large eyes staring, tender bodies pressing. Domestic interiors were almost nowhere to be seen, occluded by her subjects. The mother’s gaze at her infant, a child’s body pressed against her siblings, a poet’s beard: these were the dominant subjects in a world that at its center was mostly women’s love.

Read the entire piece, from Open Space's "One on One" series, here. Image courtesy of SFMOMA.