The Artist’s Studio Museum Network is a creative coalition of 158 museums in 24 countries – founded and run by Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Together we share knowledge, ideas and best practice, and promote and support one another. In honour of the stereoscopic show, we are looking at two early photography home-studios that are part of our Network.

Dimbola House

Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most important figures in early photography. The portraits she created remain among the most famous images of many Victorian celebrities, and her daring experimentation with close-up and diffused focus techniques influenced many later developments in photographic art. She did almost all her photography at Dimbola, the house she bought with her husband in the 1860s and occupied for some fifteen years. An adapted ‘glazed fowl house’ served as a studio, and here she photographed local people and servants as well as her famous friends and visitors.

The monochrome portrait shown here below is of botanist and explorer Marianne North – whose beautiful custom-built gallery in Kew Gardens is also a member of the Network.

The Hardmans’ House

The former home and studio of the husband-and-wife photographers Edward Chambré Hardman (1898-1988) and Margaret Hardman (1909-1970) in Liverpool is one of the photographic treasures in our Network.

Born in Dublin, Edward Chambré Hardman took his first photographs at the age of nine and developed his practice while serving as a regular officer in India. He and his business partner Kenneth Burrell purchased premises in Liverpool’s commercial centre in 1923, and established a photographic studio there. In 1932, Hardman married his former photographic assistant, Margaret Mills. Since Burrell had handed the business over entirely to his former partner, Edward and Margaret Hardman established their own practice instead, and purchased 59 Rodney Street in the early 1950s. This house would remain their home and studio for the rest of their lives, with Margaret running the business, but also taking her own evocative photographs, many of them unsigned.