Womens Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (review)

What is it about our fascination with Victorian photographs that seems to mandate confessions about our private encounters with them? Carol Mavors breathtakingly subjective accounts of her readings into nineteenth-century photographic albums seem to have cleared a space in scholarship for acknowledging the intimacy of these moments, and writers on photography are now emboldened to share, if only in their preliminary framework, stories of their own relationship with particular images. Where Victorian photography is concerned, this is arguably to the good, in that such confessions foreground the use-function of such images, now as well as then; indeed, we inevitably read such moments as a reenactment of the very practices that the critic often seeks to explore.

Patrizia Di Bellos book begins almost conventionally in this manner, with an explanation of how she found herself drawn into the world of Victorian womens albums through the portal of one particularly striking image from the 1860s, "Lady Filmer in Her Drawing Room." This isnt, in fact, a single photograph, but rather something that looks to the post-1970s eye like a Monty Python-inspired collage of cut-outs: photographs of well-dressed Victorians, presumably family and friends as well as Lady Filmer herself, all pasted against a painted backdrop of a drawing room, in which you half-expect the odd assemblage to break into an animated song and dance routine. It's a wonderfully weird picture, and it's no surprise Di Bello's students are as enthralled with it as she is: "its bright colours, uneven scale and wobbly perspective evoked not the usual image of Victorian femininity, uptight and correct, but rather something like a David Hockney design for the production of an Oscar Wilde play. . . . [Lady Filmer's] mixed media work might remind us of the photo-collages of the twentieth-century avant-garde, but it is temporally and contextually very distant from it" (1).

It is precisely this temporal and contextual distance that Di Bello must navigate in her book, which she describes as a search "for the history of the association of albums and collage to feminine forms of image-making and collecting" (1). What was the pre-photographic culture of the album, and how was it shaped by the advent of photography? How does the history of albums shape contemporary understanding of Victorian women's relationship to photography? How did photography contribute to the domestic crafting of family and society memorabilia? How are we to understand the juxtaposition of photography "and other mnemonic traces, always pointing to something that no longer is . . . with the here-and-now of tactile experience" (3)? In what ways did the crafting of albums—display books for sketches, poems, pieces of fabric, hair, watercolors, and, later, photographs and cut-outs from other image sources—provide their female creators with an occasion for societal critique, aesthetic play, and sentimental or fetishistic indulgence?

While Di Bello sees the album-maker's re-contextualization of photographs and other images as "consonant with women's role as arrangers of the domestic interior," collage, she argues, "also had the potential to destabilize the semantic work allocated to albums by dominant culture," such that the activity might signal "status and gentility" while producing "ambiguous results" (3). Moreover, as the author later notes, "photographic albums, collage, and mixed media techniques were, by the mid--nineteenth century, already suited to a self-conscious and questioning representation of the contradictions, problems and pleasures of femininity within modernity, even before they were taken up by avant-garde or feminist artists" (154).

This is an interesting claim, with its implication that perhaps early-twentieth-century collage culture did not represent a radical restructuring of post-World War I sensibilities so much as a method already well-worked by the mothers and grandmothers of Cubism. Di Bello doesn't pursue this point, nor does she mention the scrapbook, which was, both pre- and post-photography...