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Art & Thought: Playing with pictures: The art of Victorian photocollage

posted by ChickSpeak
Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 2:18pm CST

“What is that exactly?” My friend crossed her arms and cocked her head to one side. Her eyes had the tendency to get bigger when she was confused, and at the present moment, they were large green orbs, glistening over with both confusion and interest.

“Well,” I began slowly, not wanting to appear completely out of the loop, though I was admittedly just as baffled as she was. “It appears as though these women’s heads are attached to the bodies of a few ducks.”

We tore our eyes away from the picture and looked at each other. What followed was a fit of giggles and laughs that turned a few heads in the museum, including one tired-looking security guard.

Naturally, we weren’t the only ones in the gallery who felt a little amused by the whimsical nature of these Victorian photocollages. Several other visitors, including two couples, were whispering and chuckling at the pictures in front of them. A proper-looking woman, clad in a traditional lace-embroidered dress, sits atop a crane-like bird while a young girl holding a basket of flowers poses on a tortoise. The scene looks like a page ripped out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, combining black-and-white photographs with amateur watercolors that create an imaginary backdrop for its characters.

Viewers have to wonder what compelled wealthy aristocratic women living in the Victorian era to create these strange and unusual pieces. Even today, the advent of the collage is generally attributed to legends like Braque and Picasso who used newspaper cutouts and wallpaper prints to decorate their Cubist-style drawings and paintings. But this was already in the 1900s, and long after Victorian women had already begun to experiment with the idea of cutting and pasting family photographs to watercolors and sketches.

Even though “Playing With Pictures” is a relatively small exhibition, featuring 35 photocollages and 13 complete albums, the domestic and fanciful qualities of the pieces are guaranteed to reverberate with viewers long after they have journeyed to other parts of the museum.

To make sense of these pieces requires an understanding of the historical developments at the time, namely in the field of photography. In 1854, photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri patented a new type of photograph, which was called the carte de visite or CDV. The carte de viste was a small photograph that would be printed on thin paper and then mounted on a thicker paper, not unlike a playing card. These photographs became immensely popular and were frequently traded among friends and relatives during social occasions and for collection purposes, as evidenced in the photocollages of this period.

One of my favorites in the exhibition was an untitled page from the Cator Album. It features a colorful jester character extending a white cloth from around his waist. The jester has spilled the cloth, a makeshift bag of sorts, and out tumbles all these photographs. They scatter on the ground like miniature windows to the past, each picture meticulously cut out in a different shape and positioned haphazardly mid-air and across the ground. The jester’s red, yellow, and blue regalia contrasts nicely with the bleak and simple background, though it is the pictures that enhance the quality of the piece as a whole, providing the kind of diminutive detail that makes the collage memorable.

My friend, whose favorite books include Through the Looking Glass, Little Women, and Where the Wild Things Are, fell in love with an untitled page from the Bouverie Album which depicted five little girls sitting atop colorful red mushrooms and even toads. As we were waiting in the subway station for our train, she told me the picture reminded her of her own two younger sisters and how they would often play games during the summer from morning till night when there was no school.

“That’s all over,” she said. “Life isn’t like that anymore, I guess. Everything revolves around work now.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I responded. “You can really make any situation what you want it to be.”

She looked at me, confused and unable to comprehend what I was talking about. But even though we were already some distance away from the museum, my mind was still lingering behind in the gallery, dancing across the imaginative, sharp, and witty collages that adorned the museum’s walls.

For more information, please visit the exhibition’s website. “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” will be on display until May 9, 2010 and is located in The Howard Gilman Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Katherine J. Chen is an English major from Princeton University with a certificate in Creative Writing. She loves all the collages in this exhibition, and thinks that photo albums would be a lot more interesting to go through if everyone sat on a turtle, butterfly, or duck.