Getty Museum

[Woman playing cards]

Date

1890s

Medium

Matte collodion print with black ink and wash

Culture

British

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Victorian photocollage albums were created in the second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively by women of the British “Upper Ten Thousand”—the aristocracy and the landed gentry—England’s landowning class. Making such albums was deemed an acceptable pastime akin to needlework, learning a foreign language, singing, or playing a musical instrument. Here a woman could display her wit and artistic talents within domestic parameters. When not entertaining company, a woman might spend idle hours in the drawing room of her country home, snipping up photographic portraits of family, friends, and celebrities and mounting them in amusing and sometimes fantastical new settings. She drew or painted the scenes using, ink, wash, and watercolor. A Victorian collagist did not concern herself with ensuring that the photographs seamlessly blended into their drawn settings. By placing the images in new contexts, she unapologetically undermined photography’s reputation for being truthful. The collagist dictated who would inhabit her scenes and how they would be depicted. She controlled her created world, while also poking fun at individuals and society. In this page from an album assembled by an unknown maker, a young woman plays a card game at a table. Switch out the cards for some photographs, a pair of scissors, a pen, an inkwell, and a pot of glue, and it could easily depict a session of photocollaging. Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs 2021 For more information about this album see the extended essay.

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