Di Bello 2007

di Bello, Patrizia. Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England. Ashgate, 2007.

“Women’s albums operated as tactile as much as visual objects. They juxtapose photographic images and other mnemonic traces, always pointing to something that no longer is — as it was when photographed — with the hear-and-now of tactile experience: holding and turning pages, marked by the touch of the women who arranged them. To understand these albums we need to consider not only the visual, but also the tactile culture of the period. Both are crucial to my understanding of albums not as useless, quaint and old-fashioned, but as a thoroughly modern collecting practice which placed an important role in the construction of the genteel identity of women and their families. One of the most striking features of these albums is their use of collage techniques, which was common in the period. Cutting out photographs and printed or other images to recontextualize them in albums was consonant with women’s role as arrangers of the domestic interior, purchasing decorative objects and materials to recontextualise them in their own drawing rooms. But, as I argue throughout, this use of collage also had the potential to destabilize the semantic work allocated to albums by dominant culture. Cutting out and pasting paper-images was not only one of the feminine accomplishments signaling status and gentility, but could also produce ambiguous results. This ambiguity was not only visual, but also gestural: collage at once cuts and repairs, fragments and makes whole again. In the albums I discuss, these cuts and wounds are never fully resolved, never fully ‘healed’, into a smooth continuous surface, neither physically nor conceptually.” (3)