At first glance, the scale of Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, initially on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, belies its significance. The exhibition features photocollages, composed of cut-out albumen prints pasted into watercolored settings and assembled into albums by women (mostly) and men of the Victorian era. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition contained works illustrating fifteen albums, some of which had been disassembled and not previously displayed together until this monumental undertaking. Individual pages from these disassembled albums lined the walls, while intact albums were displayed in cases. Wall decorations, composed of enlarged details that embody the delightful and sometimes quirky juxtapositions of people and objects found throughout this display, drew in the viewer whose engaged looking was repaid with glimpses into another time and place, paradoxically both familiar and unfamiliar. The organizers recognized the limitations of only being able to display two pages of the intact albums at any one time, and so they created digitized facsimiles of a majority of the albums, which were in turn accessible from terminals located throughout the exhibition. The amount of time and energy dedicated to tracking down these albums, identifying the various makers, contextualizing the myriad productions found within the pages of the albums, and producing the digitize versions suggests that the resulting exhibition rests upon countless hours of thoughtful labor.

This effort should be particularly applauded in recognition of the fact that the pieces on display are not the canonical works of the “master” narrative of the history of photography, although the fact that the Blount and Milles albums were formerly in the collection of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim indicates a longstanding interest in these materials. They are, with the exception of the Blount Album, the products of women and also speak to the domestic, creative, cultural, and social practices of a particular elite circle. The exhibition implies that the Art Institute of Chicago and its partners have heeded the implicit criticism of Anne Higonnet, who in her essay “Secluded Vision, Images of Feminine Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe” noted that “most albums and amateur paintings [by women] find no place in public domains. Museums, libraries, academics, and publishing houses ignore them” (first published in Radical History Review (1987); republished in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., New York: HarperCollins, 1992, 172). In the over twenty years since Higonnet first penned her observation, public interest and scholarly engagement with this material has grown considerably. Ann Bermingham’s Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), for example, investigated the practices of women amateurs in this medium; Brittany Hudak’s MA thesis (University of Cincinnati, 2004) drew attention to the work of Kate E. Gough, who is represented in this exhibition; and, in 2006, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (originally published in 1888), a novel about four sisters who establish a photography business in London, was republished (Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop, Susan David Bernstein, ed., Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2006). The Yale Center for British Art recently presented Playing with Pictures and Mrs. Delany and her Circle, which featured Delany’s paper-cut out assemblages of botanicals and floral embroideries. Both exhibitions reveal how artistic practice could cement friendships and how socially advantaged women were concerned with the production of knowledge: Delany focused on the natural world; the Victorian album makers offered critical, sentimental, and humorous commentary on their social world, which extended from country house estates to the rapidly expanding metropolis.

Playing with Pictures draws together the following albums from public institutions and private collectors and brings to bear the latest research identifying probable makers: The Berkeley Album; The Blount Album; The Bouverie Album; the Cator Album; The F. B. Album; The Filmer Album; The Gough Album; The Jocelyn Album; The Johnstone Album; The Madame B Album; The Milles Album; the Paget Album; The Princess Alexandra Album; The Sackville-West Album; and the Westmorland Album. The frequent occurrence of aristocratic titles among the album makers is indicative of the elite social class associated with this art form. Curator Elizabeth Siegel elucidates the acts of social networking (and even flirtatious exchange) embedded in the photocollages and made visible through metaphorical images of connectivity, such as spider webs and umbrellas.

The exhibition also points out moments of parody, satire, and humor that might be lost to a contemporary audience. Wall texts help viewers understand the acts of perception required by these assemblages; one at the Art Institute of Chicago astutely argued: “If photographs already evoked the physical presence of the people pictured, combining them in photocollages with images of corporeal objects must have heightened their tactile and evocative effects.” These photocollages both provoked acts of recognition in the viewer and allowed the makers to fashion their own self-identity for the viewing public (typically their own social circle). Recurrent references to social networks, leisure pastimes (such as collecting, theater, and sport), and intellectual passions (including botany and natural history) dominate the pages of the albums, establishing a general repertoire of image making and also provoking comparisons with the work of Victorian novelists such as William Makepeace Thackeray. The curator rightly points to shifts of scale, moments of whimsy, and images of children engaged in fanciful renditions of the natural that the album makers shared with Lewis Carroll. Siegel may, however, overstate humorous aspects of select images; for example, a page of the Berkeley Album that depicts a costumed figure blowing bubbles containing inserted photographed portrait heads is compared to Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts and her predilection for calling “off with their heads.” But this image is more likely to be commenting on the transience of life than the idiosyncrasies of power; in the foreground a book labeled anno leans against a stone vase and indicates a traditional grave marker, thus suggesting that the image collects together portraits of individuals who had died that year.

Despite this evident attention to context and historical research, the exhibition sometimes seems to doubt its own material as, for instance, in an opening wall panel that states “by incorporating mechanically produced images, mixing diverse media, and showing the creative act to be of collecting and assembling rather than origination, early collagists unwittingly anticipated the insights of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes.” It is unfortunate that this prominent reference to unwitting Victorians, with its whiff of Lytton Strachey (who, in his Eminent Victorians (1918), estranges his four subjects from their renowned achievements through critique, mild satire, and recounting of personal foibles), mars an otherwise sensitive reading of these albums.

The evidence placed in front of the viewer is that the Victorians wittingly—that is, consciously—deployed “ready-made” photographs in uncanny ways because they understood them to be key constitutive materials of their modern world. The Sackville-West Album, for example, features cameos constructed of photographic portraits hanging in a shop window of an artists’ colormen, indicating the increasing dominating presence of photography in the visual fabric of the city, a point reinforced by a page from the Berkeley album that applies photographic portraits on painted sandwich boards and hoardings in an unnamed urban center. Artist Frances Elizabeth Bree reveals that the Victorian visual world was an already cobbled-together landscape, composed of a variety of representational strategies that competed for the viewer’s attention and fueled a marketplace of entertainment and information expressed in gossip, scandal, and spectacle. Her tongue-in-cheek image compares the day’s latest news—an imposter claiming to be the long-lost Tichborne baronet—with a rural fête; references to press reports populate a crumbling stone wall in front of a tent advertising the opportunity to “come come and look” at General Tom Thumb and company.

The exhibition’s interpretative work, as suggested above, emphasizes context over connoisseurship; and while the latter is a difficult task with respect to the work of amateur artists, it nonetheless would have been useful to offer more insights into the production of the watercolors, many of which reflect high levels of accomplishment. This seems particularly unfortunate given the relative sparseness of the study room at the Art Institute of Chicago, which featured recent publications as well as informative contemporaneous carte-de-visites, indicative of much of the source material for the photographic portions of the albums. Another missed opportunity was a reflection on the history of collecting: for example, how did these albums move from their private to institutional owners; what attracted Helmut Gernsheim, one of the first historians of photography, to the two albums in his collection (now owned by the Harry Ransom Center)?

It would be productive to see these comments and queries not as criticisms of this important exhibition but as opportunities for future research and inquiry since the exhibition organizers have made a cogent and persuasive case for the significance of this visual practice. Moreover, they have eased the work of future researchers by scanning albums and thus helping to ensure the long-term preservation of these fragile materials. In the future, it is hoped that more attention can be given to the display interface of this material so that when one is browsing the pages of a particular album information concerning the attributed maker and the name of the album appears simultaneously on the screen in order that one is always certain which album is being viewed. This is particularly crucial given that multiple albums are hosted by a single terminal.

Despite the modest scale of Playing with Pictures, the accumulation of visual evidence it presents demonstrates that Victorian photocollage albums were a significant creative and social practice. The attention of visitors at the Art Institute of Chicago proves that they retain their ability to fascinate. Both the exhibition and the related publication successfully expand our understanding of the photograph as personal and social signifier, its impact on British visual culture, and its multivalent significance for the first generation that came of age with photography.