But the eloquence of Cameron's portraits hardly ends there. Cameron photographed other Victorian-era luminaries like Charles Darwin, as well as lots of everyday people (her maid was a frequent model), but what may be most striking about all of her portraits is Cameron's intense, insightful portrayal of her subjects.

"I think her photographs still speak to us as very powerful portraits of the sitters," says Betsy Fryberger, curator of prints and drawings at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University.

Fryberger organized Portraits by a Victorian Photographer, a small collection of Cameron's photos that recently went on view at the Cantor Arts Center as part of its ongoing revolving exhibit of 19th-century European and American artworks from the museum's permanent collection. The selection of Cameron's photographs on display is very small--it features a half-dozen photos--but still represents a significant cross-section of her work and includes one of her more well-known photographs: the "Dirty Monk" portrait of Tennyson, so called because of his rather disheveled appearance in the photo.

On Nov. 2, Victoria Olsen, author of the recent book From Life: Julia Cameron and Victorian Photography, will give a lecture at the Cantor Arts Center focusing on Cameron's friendship and artistic association with Tennyson. The lecture, titled "Idylls of Real Life: Cameron and Tennyson, Photography and Poetry," will also feature a booksigning with Olsen, an independent scholar who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford.

"[Cameron] and her husband lived on the Isle of Wight, next door to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was the poet laureate. She made photographs of a lot of very powerful old men," Fryberger says. "But also, she photographed beautiful young girls and she also made these sort of allegorical or literary pieces, too. She was a very well-read person and I think probably quite an intellectual and a very emancipated sort of woman for her time."

Cameron did follow her own path in life. She took up the relatively new medium of photography in the mid-1800s at the age of 48, after having raised six children. She exhibited her works publicly, and even sought to make money off her photographs at a time when women were largely expected to be docile, domestic "angels in the home" (as a popular poem of the era exhorted). But Cameron's works were warmly received. "She was quite well-known and she made many, many photographs," says Fryberger.

Included among the collection of six Cameron photos at the Cantor Arts Center is her portrait of Charles Darwin. Also featured in the collection is a stirring photo of a young woman named Julia Jackson, who was Cameron's niece and one of her favorite subjects. Jackson would later become the mother of writer Virginia Woolf, who in turn would write a play called Freshwater about her unusual great aunt and the great literary and artistic circle that gathered on the Isle of Wight, in the Freshwater Bay region, where Tennyson and Cameron lived.

Fryberger notes that the old photographic processes often necessitated multiple sittings. "Because it was so difficult--you had to sit still for three to five minutes--there were lots of photographs that didn't turn out very well, so if you posed for her, chances are, you got to do that eight or 10 times, which could be rather tedious."

"If you compare her photographs to the kind of photographs that you got out of photography studios and so on, those were much more stuffy, at a distance. They were very different in feeling. What was recognized during her lifetime was how really exceptional and how very powerful her photographs were."

"Portraits of a Victorian Photographer" will be on exhibit through Feb. 29 at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Victoria Olsen will lecture and sign books on Nov. 2, 3 p.m. at the center. Admission is free to the lecture and the museum. For more information, call 650.723.4177 or visit www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva.