In her book Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema Maggie Humm explores the development of photography and cinema alongside prominent female artists of the early twentieth century including Woolf, Bell, and their associates. As the 19th century brought forth the technology of photography, many claimed that there finally existed a medium to portray objective images of events and reality, although emerging film criticism suggested that photography itself could express an artist’s emotional visions through the way photography is used. Humm illustrates how these ideas directly affected Woolf’s life in her own photography and that of Vanessa Bell, writing that even the selection of photographs for the family photo album required choosing which moments were to be retained, and therefore altering the reality of the original moment. This idea in itself also illustrates another key point of Humm’s book, that photography and visual representations of memory are inherently linked to time. While the original moment is in some way preserved in an image, it takes on a new meaning in the context it is finally shown. Humm also argues that photography is one way many women identified themselves artistically, as many women adopted the art of photography (Humm even notes how many manufacturers marketed cameras towards them), and the medium endowed them with a unique perception of memory. She argues that the selection of photographs for albums creates a sort of montage that provides for a “visual narrative.” This idea of the visual narrative is one that directly applies to the writing of Virginia Woolf. Woolf adopted photographic language in many of her essays, writing specifically about how sequences are used to portray moments and successions in time.
No comments:
Post a Comment