Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, and: Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs (review)

The scene is a large country house, delicately rendered in water colors, with towering trees and a tennis net spread out on the sweeping lawn. There are four young men and women at the net, apparently engaged in play. But this is tennis at its most surreal: the heads of the players are photographs, carefully superimposed onto the backdrop of the painting with scissors and glue, and these heads are considerably larger than their daintily painted bodies. The players look in random directions, with their sketched-in tennis racquets held up in the air like butterfly nets. One of the players looks as if he is about to fly off the lawn entirely; an older man and a woman (parents, perhaps?) stand off to the side, their dignity woefully undermined by their painted bodies (an oversized paunch for the gentleman, a judiciously penciled-in finger under her photographed chin for the lady).

The bizarre picture recalls Lewis Carroll's flamingo croquet, in which everything has its own kind of logic, both familiar and strange. This particular dream world is, however, made curiouser and curiouser by the visible presence of realism's most famous accomplice: the photograph, recontextualized, used here in the service of play.

Is it possible to describe in words the peculiarities of Victorian photocollage? The tennis game, a page from the Bouverie Album of 1872 to 1877, is reproduced in Elizabeth Siegel's catalog for last year's exhibition of photocollage albums at the Art Institute of Chicago, "Playing with Pictures." The nineteenth-century hobby of cutting out photographs, either personally taken or purchased as cartes-de-visites, and sticking them into sketches, paintings, or geometric designs to be housed in a private album, makes for strange reading. In large part, of course, this is because the albums were never intended for public display beyond the drawing room; they represent the personal amusements of their creators, and in some cases are as fabulously odd and intimate as doodles on a napkin.

The practice of photocollage was, as the contents of this exhibition catalog make clear, largely limited to the upper classes. Not only was photography in its first decades an expensive and time-consuming pursuit, but the albums—and the painting and sketching displayed in them—were the hobbies of the leisured. Thus the scenes, sites, and objects of visual play represented in the albums themselves are those enjoyed by the upper middle class: reception rooms, social engagements, ballooning, the seaside, and flower arrangements (albeit with photographed babies' heads emerging from the roses). In her recent book on the subject, Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England (2007), Patrizia Di Bello explores the culture of album-making in a specifically female context, but included here in Siegel's catalog, interestingly, are also some pages from the album of Edward Charles Blount, who proves to have been as adept as anyone at painting petals around a photographed portrait.

The catalog itself is a solid and lovely book, with album pages beautifully reproduced and usefully arranged; it's hardly surprising, then, that the three accompanying essays (by Siegel, Di Bello, and Marta Weiss) pale beside the pictures. The essays have to confront, for one thing, the fact that it's actually very difficult to respond intellectually to these images. One can offer historical context, giving information, for example, on the carte-de-visite, or on album-making, or on the objects and pursuits that feature in them, such as the significance of croquet and archery; Siegel does all this ably in her introductory essay. One can try a more specific approach, as Weiss does, by focusing on...