| Sumario: | The National Portrait Gallery's Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography (2018) was the first exhibition to examine photography as "the art of the future" (Cullinan 6). Defying earlier conventions of still, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form. While recent scholarship draws parallels between photography and painting, this essay gestures toward connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry by examining the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron alongside her poem "On a Portrait" (1876). Positioning Cameron within a larger Pre-Raphaelite tradition, this essay argues that discourses surrounding nineteenth-century photography can help us to understand the characteristics of literary Pre-Raphaelitism and to broaden scholarly conceptions of Pre-Raphaelitism beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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