SNAPSHOTS OF BLOOMSBURY. The private lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Maggie Humm. 240pp. Tate. Pounds 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, Gisele 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 .
