1st Edition

Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England Ladies, Mothers and Flirts

By Patrizia Di Bello Copyright 2007
200 Pages
by Routledge

This beautifully illustrated study recaptures the rich history of women photographers and image collectors in nineteenth-century England. Situating the practice of collecting, exchanging and displaying photographs and other images in the context of feminine sociability, Patrizia Di Bello shows that albums express Victorian women's experience of modernity. The albums of individual women, and the... Read more
Contents: Introduction; The family album, the feminine and the personal; 19th-century album culture; Photographs, albums, women's magazines; Melancholic portrait gazers; Photographs, fun and flirtations; Photography, vision and touch; Bibliography; Index.

Biography

Patrizia Di Bello is lecturer in the history and theory of photography at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.

'Patrizia Di Bello's Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England examines a fascinating aspect of photographic practice, the production by women of elaborated albums full of creative invention and wit. These albums provide a window both into the real lives of these women, often confined to the domestic realm and to finely nuanced codes of etiquette, and into their fantasies and imaginations, which frequently disputed or transcended these same codes and realms. Strongly grounded in the social history of Victorian England, Di Bello's account also manages to conjure the visual wonder of these albums, providing them, at last, with the cultural and historical significance they deserve.' Geoffrey Batchen, City University of New York, USA

’In her new book on Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England, Patrizia di Bello engages in a fascinating discussion of photographs and photographic albums, in which the latter are no longer relegated to a position of mere archival interest, but gain the status of artworks. ... It is a tour de force in art theory granting the study a complexity and breadth which justify its appeal as a work of scholarly interest.’ Art History