Page 82 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 82/146
Princess Alexandra: pages from her Norwegian Cruise Album 1893
(Royal Collection). While most, if not all, of these ladylike albums were not intended for an audi- ence any wider than the family, I get the impression with the Norwegian Cruise album that Alexan- dra’s intent is more journalistic - her album pages become a travelogue, mapped with her water- colour sketches, her sepia-toned photographs, and her carefully hand-written notes. The juxtaposi- tion of full-page prints, diagonal crops, narrative rectangular images and her written descriptions are clearly a venture into a new form of pictorial journalism - a picture-essay of her cruise on the Royal Yacht Albert.
Here I want to draw together two related strands of ‘expanded photography’: the photo-collage, such as those by Princess Alexandra, Lady Filmore and others; and the composite photography exemplified by Rejlander and Peach Robinson. The earliest example of the fusion of composite photography and painting is this large painted composite by David Octavius Hill, in which he uses no less than 474 individual photographs of each of the members of the dissenting general as- sembly, taken by his partner, the photographer Robert Adamson. Hill - who was an artist painter before he was a photographer, then spent over twenty years painting - from the individual photo- portraits - and compositing them all into the commemorative General Assembly group portrait.