Born in Calcutta, India, on June 11th, 1815. She studied in Paris and then moved to England. In 1838, she returned to India where she married Charles Hay Cameron.

Approaching photography at the age of forty-eight, a few years later, she had already exhibited at some of London’s most important galleries. She is the author of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" and "Annals of My Glass House". In 1875 she returned to India and died in Ceylon.

A collection of her photographs can be found at the "National Portrait Gallery" in London. The artist's high social level granted her the friendship of great personalities in the fields of art and literature in the Victorian world. Her ever increasing fame allowed her to portray the most important personalities of that time, although she equally took interest in photographing her own family and servants.

Although she wasn’t much concerned with the technical aspects of photography (she has even been accused of not knowing how to focus her images), she took extreme care of the esthetical and psychological views of her subjects.