Giving something to be seen: Virginia Woolf and photography

Abstract

The articles presented here aim at seeing how photographic vision shaped Virginia Woolf’s literary aesthetics, her relation to language and characterisation, and her approach of literary representation and life writing. Woolf’s relation to photography is threefold: she practices the art of mechanical reproduction (taking and developing photographs, making photo albums), a praxis which is enriched by a strong family heritage and fostered by the contemporary Kodak culture; she is immersed in a photo culture which embraces 19th-century and 20th-century aesthetics, and nurtures her theoretical and literary reflexions; and she uses photo images as rhetorical tools in the iconotexts she publishes with the Hogarth Press. Focusing on Woolf studies on photography, Julia Margaret Cameron’s legacy, the intricate links between photography and biographical writing, and interruptive stylistics in Jacob’s Room, the four contributions further Maggie Humm’s pioneering work and provide renewed perspectives on Woolf’s complex relation to photography.

Keywords

• Virginia Woolf
• photography
• intermediality
• becoming
• modernism
• Julia Margaret Cameron