Vivien and Merlin

Julia Margaret Cameron is a hero in the art world for boldly taking up photography at the age of 48. After being given a camera for her birthday, Cameron fell in love with the fledgling art form and for the next eleven years strove determinedly to "arrest all the beauty that came before me." The above photo of Vivien and Merlin was made to illustrate an edition of Lord Alfred Tennyson's "Idylls of the King", a recasting of the Arthurian legends. Though honored to be "bound up" in the same book with her hero, she was unhappy with the scale of her pictures and issued a deluxe edition - at her own cost - that featured twelve full-size photographic prints for each of the two volumes.