Maggie Humm
SNAPSHOTS OF BLOOMSBURY
The private lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
240pp. Tate. £25. 1 85437 672 1
US: Rutgers University Press. $32.95. 0 8135 3706 1
Photograph albums are doubly a thing of the past. Not only do they contain images of earlier generations, old friends and long-ago events, but they themselves are now obsolete. Maggie Humm tells us in her preface to Snapshots of Bloomsbury that “even Kodak” has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic technology: the black-and-white print, a little-changing record of family life with its own power of revelation. Humm quotes Virginia Woolf’s casual summing up of this factor: “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life?”.
Woolf’s photographic collection – seven albums, together with four boxes containing over 200 loose photographs – is currently in the Frederick Koch Collection of the Harvard Theatre Library, having been sold at Sotheby’s in 1982. It is not so very different from many family collections. The photographs may be a narrative of Woolf’s life selected by her, but the genre is recognizable: family groups and picnics with friends, with squinting eyes and faces cast in deep shadow by the sunlight, individual portraits, children, dogs, cars, attempts at “views” of foreign places. Humm’s book reproduces some of the original pages, with their four tiny prints, hand-cut mounts and handwritten captions, to give the impression of the albums as physical objects; the books themselves are described: “thick cardboard tied together with string”, “bound black album with brown paper leaves”, “cardboard covered with green mottled paper”. They show the human side of an informal extended Bloomsbury of several generations. Some distinguished men and women – Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Ethel Smyth – clearly suffer under scrutiny; they are exposed as ordinary people who share their self-consciousness in awkward compositions with ubiquitous marginal figures like Saxon Sydney-Turner, Mary Hutchinson, Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica and her friend Chattie Salamon.
Like many family albums, Woolf’s contain pictures of those who predate her, not only her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, as they were before she was born (Julia before her second marriage, with the infant George Duckworth, Leslie holding baby Laura, the child of his first marriage) and some crinolined and frock-coated grandparents, but also a selection of cartes de visite from the 1870s (Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning) forming a gallery of actual and literary forebears. Vanessa Bell’s ten albums (which are in the Hyman Kreitman Research Centre Archive and Special Collections at the Tate) are more sociable and inclusive than her sister’s. While Woolf selected solo portraits and interiors, Bell’s eye was for loose groupings, fancy dress, parties, afternoons in the garden at Charleston and Cassis. Bell’s pictures are not noticeably better than Woolf’s, but they are freer and more sensual. She experimented more with composition and contrast, and she kept some dramatically lit nude studies – of Duncan Grant and of his former lover, the mountaineer George Mallory who was known for his fine physique, and of herself and Molly McCarthy dancing together; maternal pictures display her three children naked in the sunshine. Woolf and Bell were practised, competent photographers, but a comparison with contemporaries, such as Lartigue and Kertesz, shows the limitations of their documentary approach. The casualness can have its advantages in authenticity and honesty: the studio photographs of the two women (by Man Ray, Gisèle Freund and Lettice Ramsey among others) are both clearer and duller, easier to admire but less revealing.
Humm describes Woolf’s photography as an “elegiac art”, one bound up with memory and the need to have a personal record of the past. Her introduction glances at the theory, or rather lack of theory, of amateur photography, before going on to consider its history, popularity, social function and status as a feminine pastime. The critical method she uses is a mixture of these; as well as “discourse analysis” and “psychoanalytical studies”, she draws on Bloomsbury biographies and literary studies. Her captions to the pictures provide technical information, identification of subject and date, and often an appropriate quotation from letters and journals. These may be directly pertinent, such as Woolf’s complaint, of a photograph taken by Leonard in 1932: “I feel my privacy is invaded; my legs show: & I am revealed to the world”. Others are more inventive. The formal study of Bell, taken by Lettice Ramsey, is rather cruelly captioned with a half-sentence from a letter written that day – “Poor Carrington has killed herself – yesterday . . . we are just off to Cambridge” – which has the effect of making the formal portrait of a calm and matronly woman look heartless. An indistinct snap of Vivienne Eliot comes with Woolf’s malicious comment “she is as wild as Ophelia – alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered spots – in white satin, L said”. One of the last photographs in Woolf’s album shows an awkwardly hunched and grey-haired Woolf, seated outdoors with Judith Stephen and Leslie Humphrey; taken in August 1940, six months before her death, it is captioned with an ominous description she wrote of German planes in the sky over the terrace at Monk’s House.
It is what we read into them that makes these small indistinct prints (some of them measuring no more than 3 by 4 inches) so interesting. They are full of vanished details of the way life was lived – low deckchairs, pipes, hats, round spectacles, strap shoes – and of intriguing bits of byplay: all the adolescent children look as though they wished they were not in the family group; George Duckworth, as Hermione Lee has pointed out, always seems to be standing too close to people; Vivienne Eliot is pointing at her husband in a slightly dotty way. And, once they are provided with a biographical context, reading the photographs seems almost too easy. Some appear particularly revealing: what Humm calls the “primal scene” of Woolf at Talland House at the age of ten, looking out at the camera, almost hidden behind her parents who are concentrating on their books; Woolf again, at the age of thirteen, just after her mother’s death, a pale, blurry image; Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes, former lovers, posed by Bell, facing each other without expression. Some interpretations are strained. The fact that Woolf was photographed with Leonard in the dress she later wore to her wedding seems at least as interesting as the observation that the photographer’s use of a low angle “renders the couple with great presence”.
As well as reproducing 200 photographs, a generous and well-chosen selection from the holdings, many of which are unfamiliar, Snapshots of Bloomsbury also prints a meticulous catalogue of Woolf’s photographic collection (Bell’s have already been catalogued by the Tate). The list, which also mentions duplicates and missing prints – taken out for biographies – contains many poignant “unidentified”s and photographs whose significance has not lasted over the years: “Four photographs of a dog on a chair”, “Two views of a Scottish loch”, “Four views: Chartres, Albi, Valençay”. To be lamented, among the negatives “on nitrate film and unreproducible at Harvard”, are two vanished moments in time and place – “T. S. Eliot in shorts in garden” and Vita Sackville-West “on a donkey in Persia”.
