Page 78 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 78/146 From Victorian scrapbooks and Collage to Photomontage
Victorian scrap-book c1890. Home-made scrapbooks where many thousands of people created a home hobby of collecting colour and monochrome pictures from the newly abundant printed ‘eph- emera’ - wrapping paper, greeting cards, printed posters, tickets, post-cards, cigarette cards (etc) - these were a new form of popular art in the late 19th century.
At this stage it’s important that we step backwards a decade or so to recap the story of one of the most fundamentally revolutionary of the ‘expansions’ of photography - Photomontage (so named in 1931) is an extension of collage - specifically the papier colles of Picasso and Braque - made in 1912. But - there are 19th century precedents in the scrap-books and album pages, and glued,
Victorian 4-fold scrap screen c1880.
These are wooden frames covered with stretched fabric, upon which makers glued cut-outs,
culled from magazines, packaging, catalogues, posters, seed packets, chromolith prints, wrap-
ping paper and other ephemera.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/karmakitten/victorian-scrap-screens/
These early cut-out and glued artefacts were not graced with the nomenclature of Modernism of course - nor were there any conventional formal descriptors (except maybe ‘primitive’ or ‘folk art’?) - they were simply the personal creations of people who had a taste for collecting and ar- ranging - and an eye for self-similarity, thematic assonance, pattern and above all for printed colour - a novelty still in Victorian times - especially the glossy ‘chromo’s’ (chromolithographs) and product packaging used at the emergence of modern branding. No actual ‘photographs’ in these examples, but see below for Princess Alexandra’s ‘narrative’ scrap-book pages.