Galleries 1-2

Overview: Sixty years ahead of the avant-garde, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s on their heads.


Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier. Untitled page from the Madame B Album, 1870s. Mary and Leigh Block Endowment.


Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers, as they take on new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict conventions of aristocratic society. Together they provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the Victorian era and enduring inspiration for photographic experimentation today.

This exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the little-known phenomenon of Victorian photocollage, presenting work that has rarely—and in many cases never—before been displayed or reproduced. Playing with Pictures showcases the best albums and loose pages from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia; 40 pages are shown in frames on the wall, while 11 separate albums are displayed in cases, accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors for visitor interaction.

A beautiful catalogue accompanies the exhibition and is available in the Museum Shop. Featuring over 150 color illustrations, the volume presents essays by exhibition curator Elizabeth Siegel and other respected scholars as well as entries on the albums and their makers. A new gift book based on an album in the museum’s collection, The Marvelous Album of Madame B, is also available.