# What Counts as a Photograph She Made > Julia Margaret Cameron registered 508 photographs and never attached a specimen to any of them. Her authorship is a question about prints and paperwork, not about images. > The Study - 2026-09-25 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/what-counts-as-a-photograph-she-made/ ## Key points - Julia Margaret Cameron registered 508 of her photographs for copyright at Stationers' Hall between 1864 and 1875. The office allowed her to attach a specimen print to each entry and she never once did it, so the legal record of her authorship is a file of written descriptions with no photographs in it. - For more than four and a half years, from February 1866 until October 1870, the entry forms were signed by an agent rather than by her, as Edward Stowell for Julia Margaret Cameron, with three forms she signed herself in March 1866. - Her last applications, sent on 18 October 1875 as she was leaving for Ceylon, were not for new work. They were for Autotype carbon copies of five of her earlier portraits of famous men, which is the same question this piece asks, asked by her. - This archive shows three objects from one 1867 sitting: the albumen print she made, a carbon print in the Museum of Modern Art made by another process and other hands, and a digital restoration of the first made by a volunteer in this century. Only the first is a print she made, and the carbon prints were her own commission, made from copy transparencies, retouched, and stamped by the printer rather than by her. - When the question became money, the test turned out to be the paper. The disputed Hine prints tested in 1999 were modern prints from genuine negatives, and they were caught by optical brightening agents that photographic paper did not carry before about 1945, not by anything visible in the picture. ## The author of a photograph is a question about the print ## One sitting, three objects, in this archive alone ## Her own hand is the evidence, and it disagrees with itself ## She registered descriptions, and never attached a picture ## Where the test turned out to be the paper ## Two crops, and a negative nobody can produce ## And one object that nobody alive in 1879 could have made ## What to ask before calling a print a Cameron ## Why this archive is free to read Cameron did the one thing the nineteenth century gave her to do about authorship: she put her work on the register at Stationers' Hall 508 times, with her own name in both columns, as proprietor of the copyright and as author of the work. The system she was using could not hold a photograph, only a description of one, so the legal proof of what she made is a stack of paper with no pictures in it, and of the 508 entries only 249 can now be matched to a surviving image. Meanwhile the objects went on being cut, mounted, signed by an agent, printed in carbon from copy transparencies by a company that took forty per cent, engraved into photogravure by her son fourteen years after she died and, in the end, cleaned up by a stranger with software. A print is not a picture. Anyone writing a caption should say which one they are holding. ## Questions **How many photographs did Julia Margaret Cameron copyright?** 508, over eleven and a half years from 1864 to 1875, at the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall in London. The entry forms survive at the National Archives in the class COPY 1. The office allowed a specimen print to be attached to an entry and she never did so, so the registrations describe her photographs in words without reproducing them. **Did Cameron sign her own copyright registrations?** Only at first. She signed personally in 1864 and 1865, and then from early 1866 until October 1870 the forms were signed by an agent as Edward Stowell for Julia Margaret Cameron, with three forms she signed herself on 23 March 1866. She returned to signing her own from 1871. **Is a carbon print of a Cameron photograph a Cameron?** It depends on who made it and when, and the honest description names both. This archive holds an albumen print of her Herschel portrait that she made and a later carbon print of the same pose in the Museum of Modern Art, and captions them differently. Cameron herself registered copyright in Autotype carbon copies of five earlier portraits in October 1875, so she claimed the image even where she had not made the object. **How were the fake Lewis Hine prints detected?** By testing the paper rather than by looking at the pictures. Analysis of paper fibre, of the manufacturers' logos printed on the backs of photographic papers and of optical brightening agents, which photographic paper did not carry before about 1945 and which fluoresce under ultraviolet light, showed that the disputed prints were modern. They had been printed from Hine's own negatives after his death. **Why does this archive show a digitally restored photograph?** Because the cleaned version is the one most readers meet elsewhere, and putting it beside the unretouched digitisation is the only way to make the difference visible. It is captioned as a modern derivative image and not as a photograph Cameron made. ## Sources - [1] R. Derek Wood, "Julia Margaret Cameron's copyrighted photographs" (May 1996), a study of the Copyright Office entry forms at the National Archives, class COPY 1, pieces 6 to 31, for the text of the entry form, the total of 508 registrations between 1864 and 1875, the specimen option she never used, the agent signing as Edward Stowell, and the final applications of 18 October 1875 for Autotype copies. The 1996 PDF is the clean text; the HTML version of the same study renders several years wrongly. - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir John Herschel, April 1867, albumen print, Gilman Collection, accession 2005.100.25. - [3] Victoria and Albert Museum, collection record for J.F.W. Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the prints of the same composition in a public collection. - [4] Victoria and Albert Museum, "Julia Margaret Cameron's working methods", on her printing practice, her use of damaged negatives and her commercial arrangements. - [5] National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, collection record for Sir J.F.W. Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron, the 1869-dated print with the Colnaghi blindstamp. - [6] Bonhams, London, 18 May 2004, sale 11255, lot 20, Julia Margaret Cameron, J.F.W. Herschel, 1869, for the sheet size and the Colnaghi blindstamp of that print. - [7] Sotheby's, New York, Age of Wonder, 9 December 2022, lot 1027, Julia Margaret Cameron, J.F.W. Herschel, for the sheet size and the 1867 date of that print. - [8] Winterthur Museum, "Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes", the Hine Photograph case, for the statement of the reprinting problem, the provenance of the Greenville print, the contrast and condition tells, Hine's pencil captions on the verso, and the label naming Walter Rosenblum as the printer. - [9] International Center of Photography, collection object record for Weegee, The Critic, accession 7229.1993, one of the separately catalogued prints of the image. - [10] Wikimedia Commons, category of portraits of John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron, for the file pages and licence metadata of the plates used here, including the volunteer restoration credited to Adam Cuerden. - [11] Julia Margaret Cameron, "Annals of My Glass House", written about 1874 and first published in 1889, her own account of taking up photography and of her working method. - [12] Fine Arts Copyright Act 1862, 25 and 26 Vict. c. 68, sections 4 and 5, for what the register had to record, for the specimen being supplied only if the person registering shall so desire, and for the fee of one shilling an entry. - [13] The National Archives, Kew, series description for COPY 1, Copyright Office: Entry Forms, 1837 to 1912, the class in which Cameron's registrations are held. - [14] Art Institute of Chicago, collection record for Sir John Herschel, photogravure, 1867, printed about 1893, plate 11 of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his Friends, the album published by her son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron after her negatives. - [15] Museum of Modern Art, collection record for Julia Margaret Cameron, Sir John F. W. Herschel, carbon print, dated 1867 with no separate printing date, object 832.1965. - [16] Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), the catalogue raisonne, for the four Herschel studies as catalogue numbers 674 to 677 all copyrighted on 9 April 1867, the price of twenty shillings for the signed portraits, the Autotype contract of 1875 and how the carbon prints were made, the agents signing the registrations, and the finding that only 249 of the 508 registered works can be matched to a known image. - [17] Art Institute of Chicago, collection record for Sir John Herschel, carbon print, dated 1867, printed 1875, Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1949.878, one of the few carbon prints of this sitting catalogued with a printing year. - [19] Victoria and Albert Museum, collection record for a carbon print from a copy negative of Herschel, museum number 12-1939, which names the printer J. B. Obernetter and separates the dates, photographed April 1867 and printed about October 1875. - [19] Princeton University Art Museum, collection record for John Herschel, carbon print, dated 1867, printed later, object 2010-177, from the Clarence H. White Collection. - [21] Yale University Art Gallery, collection record for Herschel, photogravure, dated 1867, printed later, object 2016.101.36. - [21] "Intrigue in the World of Photography: The Fake Lewis Hine Prints", read in the Internet Archive capture of 21 August 2025 after the live page returned HTTP 403, for the collector Michael Mattis having the prints tested in 1999, the prices of three to eight thousand dollars, the verso stamp from paper stock issued after Hine's death, and the record that the affair settled out of court and that Rosenblum admitted no wrongdoing. - [23] Malcolm Daniel, "Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)", Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, for her taking up the camera at forty-eight and producing perhaps 900 images in a dozen years, and for her vigorous copyrighting, exhibiting, publishing and marketing of her work.