The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has acquired what may be one of the earliest deliberate mirror self-portraits in the history of photography, Artnet News reported on October 10. The ambrotype, thought to date to the late 1850s, was made by Mia Jackson, the younger sister of the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. It shows Jackson regarding the viewer coolly while the camera itself sits at the center of the composition, reflected in the mirror. The museum's photography curator Marta Weiss called the image strikingly modern, saying she had never seen such an early example of a deliberate self-portrait made with a mirror. Victorian studios commonly used mirrors as props, she noted, but the camera itself was almost never reflected in the frame. The portrait was discovered by Jackson's descendants inside an envelope, alongside another ambrotype depicting an unidentified South Asian woman. Both works are now in the V&A's collection, and this is the first time any photograph has been identified as authored by Jackson. Weiss acknowledged some ambiguity in the attribution: cameras had no timer function in the 1850s, so a collaborator would have had to remove and replace the lens cap to make the exposure, and a tall, shadowy figure visible just behind Jackson may have been that operator. But the sitter's stance and expression, Weiss said, assert her authorship of the composition, describing a familiar self-scrutiny visible across centuries of self-portraiture. Jackson, born Maria Pattle aboard a ship in 1818, is best known as Cameron's sister and as the grandmother of two more famous English sisters: the writer Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell. She died in England in 1892. Her self-portrait will go on public display at the V&A in May, together with the anonymous portrait of a South Asian woman, which is thought to connect to the Jackson family's deep ties to colonial India.