From a critical discussion of the work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
What Cameron called her "fancy-subject" pictures—photographs in which two or more costumed sitters enacted, under Cameron's direction, scenes from the Bible, mythology, Shakespeare, or Tennyson—bear unmistakable traces of the often comical conditions under which they were taken. In many respects they have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives who have been herded together for the obligatory group picture than they do to the masterpieces of Western painting. In Raphael and Giotto there are no infant Christs whose faces are blurred because they moved, or who are looking at the viewer with frank hatred. These traces, of course, are what give the photographs their life and charm. If Cameron had succeeded in her project of making seamless works of illustrative art, her work would be among the curiosities of Victorian photography—like Oscar Gustave Rejlander's extravagantly awful The Two Ways of Life—rather than among its most vital images.
It is precisely the camera's realism—its stubborn obsession with the surface of things—that has given Cameron's theatricality and artificiality its atmosphere of truth. …
What gives Cameron's pictures of actors their special quality—their status as treasures of photography of an unfathomably peculiar sort—is their singular combination of amateurism and artistry. …
Based on the passage, Cameron is most like which one of the following in relation to her fancy-subject pictures?
a playwright who introduces incongruous elements to preserve an aesthetic distance between characters and audience
It’s not clear that Cameron wanted to preserve an aesthetic distance between the people in her pictures and people looking at the pictures
a rap artist whose lyrics are designed to subvert the meaning of a song sampled in his recording
It’s not clear that Cameron wanted to subvert anything in the stories or scenes that she was drawing upon in her pictures.
a sculptor whose works possess a certain grandeur even though they are clearly constructed out of ordinary objects
This is most analogous. The sculptor’s work possesses a certain grandeur, which is analogous to the way in which Cameron’s pictures possess a peculiar charm. In addition, this grandeur exists despite the fact that the sculptor’s work is made out of ordinary objects. This is analogous to the way in which Cameron’s pictures involve subjects who are amateur, ordinary people.
an architect whose buildings are designed to be as functional as possible
It’s not clear that Cameron’s pictures are designed for any particular functional purpose.
a film director who employs ordinary people as actors in order to give the appearance of a documentary
Although Cameron used ordinary people, this wasn’t because she wanted to make the pictures seem to portray real-life scenes. Cameron portrayed scenes from Shakespeare, the Bible, mythology, and other poets.
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