Page 103 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Princess Alexandra 1865 The Album of Designs
Another way of extending the scope and context of photographs in the mid-19th century was beginning to be explored by individuals like Princess Alexandra, who was not only an accomplished photographer, 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 templates – she seems to be among the first to explore the combination of illustrations, text and photographs 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 populating 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-collage, then the cabinet card, the photo- album, the scrapbook, all extended the creative and presentational aspects of photography.
The Album of Designs, incorporating photographs, is an album consisting of 29 hand-coloured pages, each 26.4 x 36.2 cm and hand-coloured, with cut-out photographs glued into each design. It is part of the Royal Collection, and one of two albums that Alexandra made in the 1860s. I like the similarity between this image and the infamous Cottingly Fairy photographs of 60 years later. There is a ‘fairy- painting’ quality about this - the images are of babies and young children, and it is during this time of life that the magic and dreamlike potential of the world has not yet been rationalised into mundanity. But Alexandra’s work, as mentioned above, is an important precedent of 20th century commercial art (or graphic design as it became known in the 1960s). By the 1930s, adverts that combined illustrations, photographed ‘pack-shots’ or products in miniature, typography (typeset copy), and hand-drawn lettering, combined with a logotype or other matter, were commonplace in magazines, and on posters. In commercial (mass produced) work, it is Leopold Reutlinger’s ornate postcards incorporating these graphic components that follow Alexandra’s innovation (Reutlinger: Postcard Portraits 1890).