Virginia Woolf’s ‘raids across boundaries’: Biography vs Photography

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s legacy was both photographic and biographical, she inherited her father’s interest in biography and her great-aunt’s fascination for photography and welded those interests all along her career as a novelist, biographer and theoretician. ‘The New Biography’, the 1927 article by she meant to revolutionize biography, expresses the advent of the new genre in terms which are laden with visual metaphors and seems to equate the task of the new biographer with the task of the photographer. In 1938 however, with ‘The Art of Biography’, Woolf reverted to a more pessimistic vision of photography, one that confined it to the realm of inaccurate and fallacious representation. In short, the great biographer had the genius of the painter, the bad biographer merely conveyed a photographic likeness, a semblance of personality. I shall argue that this change in attitude towards photography was in fact linked to the biographical practice of Woolf at the time she wrote her essays. Orlando and Flush illustrate the fascination felt by Woolf for photography whose representative potential she playfully experimented with in her subversive texts, whereas Roger Fry and her use of photographs as illustrations probably derived from a more derogatory conception of photography as mimetic and superficial representation.

Keywords

• modernism
• biography
• photography
• mimetic representation
• visual arts
• theory and practice