
GNE-Events
Prof. Maggie HummVirginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Domestic Photography
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Maggie Humm is a Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. Her books include Border Traffic, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory, Modern Feminisms, Feminism and Film, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell. She was an editor of the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Women and has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Professor at many universities including Massachusetts, San Diego State, Stanford, Rutgers, Queen`s Belfast, and Karachi. Her most recent book is ‘The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts’.
Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Domestic Photography
Virginia Woolf the writer and her sister Vanessa Bell the artist created self-portraits, portraits of their friends and family, and also the places where they lived. Both were autobiographical artists whose portraits draw on visual memories shaping fictional identities and painted figures. Any artistic expression of identity draws on repositories of memory. As autobiographical artists, Woolf and Bell’s lives provide an insight into their work and their numerous domestic photographs provide further insights into both work and their lives. In envisioning the ways in which identity is shaped by imagery and memory, the sisters were able to see themselves as ‘other’, as Barthes suggests, by means of photography. The sisters took, developed and mounted over 1,000 photographs each and exchanged photographs with a wide circle of friends, including Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lytton Strachey, at a time when photography was permeating popular culture. Photography was also a constituent component of their visual inheritance from Julia Margaret Cameron, the famous Victorian photographer and their great-aunt, and the photo albums of their father Leslie Stephen and their half-sister Stella Duckworth.
Constructions of visual identity always involve questions of memory and speculations about how to record the thickness and malleability of personal lives. The paper follows issues raised in my Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Tate publishing, 2006, and discusses ways of reading domestic photography, as well as a brief account of the history of domestic photography and the photographs taken by Woolf and Bell.
See for details website: www.maggiehumm.net and for more: http://www.uel.ac.uk/hss/staff/maggie-humm/index.htm












