Page 81 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 81/146
Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer: Page from the Filmer Album mid 1860s.
I love the perspective juxtapositions in Lady Filmer’s drawing room - even the spaniel has his own floor cushion - and note the vignetted and framed photo-pictures on the walls. The ‘reality’ of the photo-portraits, located in this narrative spatial watercolour context, imply a strange set of narrat- ives, and perhaps this was part of the delight of this art-work - it is rather like Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre kits of this period, - you could construct your own visual commentary on the family, compose your own settings and interior-decor, determine the colour treatment, even impose a fanci- ful narrative during the making of such images. Of course, these home-made compositions are al- most completely outside the concerns of fine-artists during this period. Outside the composite-pho- tography innovations of Rejlander, Peach Robinson, David Octavius Hill and William Notman - and of course Daguerre’s painted composites for his Diorama back-drops), I haven’t discovered any photo-montage experiments from the 19th century, but in Antonin Artaud’s re-discovery of Alfred Jarry’s theatre in the 1920s, Artaud commissioned several photo-montages of scenes from Jarry’s plays (such as Ubu Roi - .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary-georgiana-caroline-lady-filmer-untitled-loose-page-from-the-filmer-album-mid-1860s.jpg
There is one last ‘amateur’ contribution to 19th century photo-montage that I want to consider, and it is Princess Alexandra’s ‘Norwegian Cruise’ album, made in 1893.