Memory and Photography in the Photo Albums of Virginia Woolf

All the major modernist women, H. D., Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf owned the ‘vest-pocket’ Kodak, were prolific photographers and created visual theories aware that this new technology offered a new visual aesthetic.
The chapter argues that an evaluation of the margins – photo albums as well as image/texts like Woolf’s Three Guineas - is crucial to rethinking modernist aesthetics by recovering feminine meanings from hitherto ‘invisible’ art.
There are over one thousand un-catalogued photographs taken by Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf, many in photo albums mounted by Woolf. While there are essays about Woolf’s visual aesthetics, most essays discuss the role of the visual in Woolf’s writings rather than examine Woolf’s domestic photographs as artefacts in themselves. The photo albums unusual visual sequences represent a fascinating psychobiography, in particular revealing Woolf’s identification with her dead mother.

Citation:
Humm, M. (2005) 'Memory and Photography in the Photo Albums of Virginia Woolf', In: D. Fisher, A. Mays, S (eds.) Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century, Cunningham, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005 pp 42-51.