Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema

An exploration of modernist women’s distinctive role in domestic and cinema arts in the context of current debates about gender and modernism. Photographs, particularly domestic photos of family and friends, taken by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell form the centrepiece of this delightful book. Many rare and intimate images discovered among the archive collections of their photographs are published here for the first time and are analysed in relation to contemporary photographic and cinematic practice. Discussion of the cinema writings of Colette, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Bryher and the role of the visual in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas also feature in Maggie Humm’s consideration of women and visual culture. This new approach to modernist visual aesthetics draws on a range of photographic, psychoanalytic and visual theory, on modernist criticism and on extensive, original archive research. The concern in the book with women’s ways of looking as well as an assessment of how gendered subjectivities are visually constructed will be crucial to rethinking modernist aesthetics. Illustrated with 45 black and white plates, including several complete pages from photo albums, from sources including Virginia Woolf’s ‘Monk’s House Albums’, the ‘Leslie Stephen Photograph Album’ and Vanessa Bell’s ‘Albums’.