ABSTRACT
While Cameron has been acknowledged by art historians as a great amateur photographer, and has been granted the same kind of admiration that has been given to artists such as Lewis Carroll, Cameron’s Madonna pictures have been among the least appreciated in an oeuvre that features about three thousand photographs in all. Cameron was a performer. She was a highly visible eccentric who wore red velvet in the summer and stirred cups of tea while walking to the train station. She smelled not of delicate flowers but of photographic chemicals. Mark Taylor’s explorations of alterity are largely dependent on the work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, the other is independent and autonomous, with its own qualities and attributes, and is prior to the subject; in other words, the other is the “alterer” of our own subjectivity.
