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Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 80/146
Princess Alexandra: Design with Flowers- page from her ‘album’ (c1865).
Another way of extending the scope and context of photographs in the mid-19th century was begin-
ning to be explored by individuals like Princess Alexandra, who was not only an accomplished pho-
tographer, but also a designer with an eye to contemporary fashion. Her beautiful album-page
designs indicate something more than just following a fad or using readymade commercial tem-
plates – she seems to be among the first to explore the combination of illustrations, text and photo-
graphs that became the basis of ‘commercial art’ (later called ‘graphic design’) in the 20th century.
That this form of mixed-media collage (in the 20th century we would call this photomontage) had
become a middle-class – mostly female (see also Constance Sackville-West’s album pages from the
1870s) – creative activity, is testified to by these examples. The collage becoming a way of populat-
ing a watercolour, with photographs of family and friends. The watercolour is used to provide a
pictorial context for the vignetted photographs. These collages are a form of self-expression and a
kind of ‘information design’ as families and relationships are mapped pictorially. This is another of
the extensions of photography that emerged around the 1850s. The carte de visite, the photo-col-
lage, then the cabinet card, the photo-album, the scrapbook, all extended the creative and presenta-
tional aspects of photography.
https://juliamargaretcameronsecession.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/princess-alexandra-design-with-flowers-album-page-c1868/
These ‘amateur’ ‘album’ creations - (there are many examples - these are drawn from the Metropolit- an Museum NYC - including the albums of Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer, Constance Sack- ville West, Georgina Berkeley, etc) - most of them sharing the technique of watercolour painting with collaged, cut-out or vignetted albumen silver photographic images. As I said above, most are in- tensely personal pictorial dialogues between the artist/maker and her visual diary or scrap-book - called by these aristocratic and upper middle-class ladies, their ‘albums’ - so we have the Filmer Al-
bum, the Sackville-West Album, etc), most dating from the 1860s-1880s. https://collections.eastman.org/objects/31228/sackvillewest-album;jsessionid=A14D4E13F627FC64E7610E3B5203A054