Images Re-Vues (Dec 2023)
Les albums photographiques au XIXe siècle entre souvenir privé et document public : Victor Hugo et l’Album Allix (traduction)
Abstract
After first establishing some general characteristics of nineteenth-century photographic albums, this article analyses one of the most exceptional and elaborate created during the Second Empire, namely the Album Allix (1856-60). Put together by the entourage of Victor Hugo during his time in exile on the Channel Islands, it brings together numerous portrait photographs of the poet, alongside images of his family and friends. The article focuses on the ways in which Hugo is represented as the national writer of France through iconography and pose (as well as posture), on the one hand, and the ornate framing of his portraits on the album pages, on the other. It demonstrates that in the album the personal biography of Hugo is closely aligned to the history of France through an intermedial, text and image dynamic specific to photo albums in the nineteenth century, as bringing together private and public, family and nation, memory and document.
