Detail: Painting of Julia Margaret Cameron by George Frederic Watts

Julia Margaret Pattle was born in British India, on June 11, 1815, the daughter of an official in the Bengal Civil Service and a descendant of the French aristocracy. After her early years she received an education in France and England, returning to India in 1834. Four years later, in 1838, she married Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior. In 1848, after Charles retired, he and Julia returned to England where they raised five children, adding a sixth in 1857 when they adopted Mary Ryan. Through Julia’s sister, Sarah Prinsep, the new arrivals cultivated a wide circle of elite, intellectual friends. It is this company of friends, family, and servants that Cameron used as models for her “tableux vivants”.
FROM http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/creator/julia-margaret-cameron

Cameron’s practice of photography began relatively late in her life, at age forty-eight, when her daughter gave her a sliding wooden box camera. Her “very first success in photography” came in January 1864, with a portrait of Annie, daughter of a neighbor.
Cameron used the wet collodion process, making prints with albumen printing-out paper, and worked with large negatives in order to avoid having to enlarge. In 1864 she began to register her work at the British Copyright Office, became a member of the Photographic Society of London and of Scotland, and prepared photographs for exhibition and sale through the London print dealers P. and D. Colnaghi. Most of her work was made between 1864 and 1875, before she left for family coffee plantations in Ceylon.
FROM https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/julia-margaret-cameron?all/all/all/all/0

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” Condemned by some contemporaries for sloppy craftsmanship, she purposely avoided the perfect resolution and minute detail that glass negatives permitted, opting instead for carefully directed light, soft focus, and long exposures that allowed the sitters’ slight movement to register in her pictures, instilling them with an uncommon sense of breath and life.  FROM http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/julia-margaret-cameron

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Beauty of the Heroine: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Poetic Portrait

Julia Margaret Cameron: soft-focus photographer with an iron will

Mr. Avedon revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive. So great a hold did Mr. Avedon’s fashion photography come to have on the public imagination that when he was in his 30’s he was the inspiration for Dick Avery, the fashion photographer played by Fred Astaire in the 1957 film “Funny Face.” In 1978 he appeared on the cover of Newsweek while a retrospective exhibition of his work was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/02/obituaries/richard-avedon-the-eye-of-fashion-dies-at-81.html

MoMA Collection~ http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/248?=undefined&page=1
International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum~ http://www.iphf.org/hall-of-fame/richard-avedon/

American Masters~ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/richard-avedon-about-the-photographer/467/
The Richard Avedon Foundation~ http://www.theavedonfoundation.net/

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“Before White was able to become a full-time artist and teacher, he worked for nearly a decade in Newark, Ohio, balancing a bookkeeping job with his avocation as a photographer. Featured in the third issue of Camera Work, White received international recognition for his work…In 1906 he moved to New York and assisted Alfred Stieglitz in the operation of his newly opened gallery.”
FROM http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=6761

“When White first began teaching, the medium of photography was coming into its own as a means of artistic expression, and its advantages for communication had been acknowledged. Photographs were preferred over wood engravings and often over drawings for illustration in newspapers and magazines. The use of photographs in advertisements was on the rise. But no place existed for people to learn how to use the camera in the art of seeing.

Charismatic amateur photographer and teacher Clarence H. White was inspired to found a school that would advocate applying art principles to professional and commercial as well as art photography.”
FROM http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0112/white.html

Clarence H. White: https://media.artic.edu/stieglitz/clarence-h-white/
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Hudson_White