The Angel in the House

Tracy Jean Shields is a native Californian currently living in Ojai, California. She has recently spent more than a decade living in the UK in London and the Isle of Wight, where she was researching and writing her first feature film script ‘The Angel in the House’ based on the life of the prominent Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Tracy’s own photography career as a fine art photographer began at Santa Monica College in the mid-’90s before digital photography when she was shooting film on a vintage Praktica 35mm camera and printing all her black & white and color photos in the darkroom. During this period she showed her work in Los Angeles photo exhibitions and won photo awards, such as the prestigious Carmel Center for Photographic Art, 12th & 14th Annual Center Awards, and her work is also in the Yale University Archive, Peter E. Palmquist Collections of Western American & Women's Photography. She assisted in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum where she contributed to the Getty publication of 'Julia Margaret Cameron, The Complete Photographs', and worked as an Assistant Curator to the private photo collection The Wilson Centre for Photography. Both of these great 19th and 20th-century photo collections inspired her greatly, notably, the work of Eugene Atget, August Sander, Anne Brigman, Paul Outerbridge, Diane Arbus, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Walker Evans. While in the UK Tracy had the opportunity to live in Dimbola Lodge, the 19th century home of Julia Margaret Cameron, while living in Dimbola Lodge Tracy made a short film on her first digital Leica camera about Mrs. Cameron, and the film was chosen as a finalist in the 2009 Isle of Wight Film Festival, and won the ‘Director’s Cut’ at the Anthony Minghella Film Festival on the Isle of Wight in 2010. She also presented a talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London at the 2016 Julia Margaret Cameron 200th bi-centenary celebration. With 15 years in the making, Tracy has now completed her research and she is thrilled that her screenplay ‘The Angel in the House’ has already been chosen as an Official Selection of the 2021 Toronto International Women Film Festival.