Page 48 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 48/146
Princess Alexandra: Norwegian Cruise album pages 1893.
These are two of a series of album pages designed and constructed by Alexandra (then Princess of Wales) to record the voyage, with her children and the Princess Maud, on the Royal Yacht Osborne in August 1893. These remarkable pages (there are several) show how Alexandra was integrating her photographs (of different sizes and formats), her watercolour sketches, and her hand-written narrat- ive of the summer cruise. This strikes me as a very modernist exercise - not exactly the photo-journ- alism of Fenton or Matthew Brady (whose images were never presented in this way), but more than a paste-up of her own aide memoire. There is an interesting integration of written narrative, photos and watercolour illustration. It combines the three media into a composite whole, as Frances Dimond points out: “Princess Alexandra’s album (which was the first of several), like Oliver Montague’s, con- tained commercial photographs and other printed material. But to these she added personal touches in the form of her own descriptions, sketches and photographs. There is more than a hint that she enjoyed descriptive writing.” Dimond: Developing the Picture - Queen Alexandra and the Art of Pho- tography 2004.
Alexandra was an accomplished amateur photographer (see her Queen Alexandra’s Christmas Gift Book 1903), and although she was often dismissed intellectually (mostly because of her deafness), she obviously brings an interesting creativity to bear in her albums, early examples of multimedia montage, photo-essays and pictorial records of her voyages as Princess of Wales.
These album pages are, I believe, like Reutlinger’s postcards, also a marker in the history of graphic design, which was also to absorb influences from all the strands of Modernism - from William Morris, through Art Nouveau and the Dadaists to the Russian Revolution, De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_of_Denmark https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/trails/women-photographers/princess-alexandra-1844-1925