Page 132 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 132/206
Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer: Page from the Filmer Album mid 1860s.
I love the perspective juxtapositions in Lady Filmer’s imaginary drawing room - even the spaniel has his own floor cushion - and note the vignetted and framed hand-coloured photo-pictures on the walls. The ‘reality’ of the photo-portraits, located in this spatial watercolour context, imply a strange set of narratives, 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 fanciful narrative during the making of such images. Of course, these home-made compositions are almost completely outside the concerns of fine-artists during this period. Far from the composite-photography innovations of Rejlander, Peach Robinson, David Octavius Hill and William Nottman - and of course Daguerre’s painted composites for his Diorama back-drops), I haven’t discovered any fine art 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 1896).
It is amateur mixed-media photo-collage like those of Lady Filmer, Princess Alexandra and others, that provide the historical precedent for the revolutionary innovations in collage and photo-montage to come in the 29th century - first with the papier colles of Picasso and Braque in 1911-12, then with the Dadaist photomontage from 1918-19.