Overview

"This study offers an original approach to modernist visual aesthetics, drawing on a range of photographic and visual theory, psychoanalytic theories of the visual and modernist criticism as well as on original archive research. The book covers the domestic photography of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the cinema writing of Colette, HD, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Bryher and the role of the visual in Virginia Woolf's ""image/text"" ""Three Guineas"". Throughout, there is a concern with women's ways of looking and a critical exploration of how gendered subjectivities are visually constructed. The modernist women considered in the book owned ""vest-pocket Kodaks"" and were prolific photographers. The book focuses in particular on the photographic practices of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and explores the photo albums compiled by them. It includes many rare and fascinating images discovered among the archive collections of their photographs which have never been published before. The text shows the ways in which an evaluation of the visual is crucial to rethinking modernist aesthetics. It examines a freer range of aesthetics which modernist women explored in domestic and cinema arts and asks what such an exploration tells us about gender and modernism."

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9780748616831

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Reviews

Humm's book is most valuable in its detailed discussions of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen's early and long-lasting fascination with photography. Here her argument that photographs are carriers of gendered memories is original and persuasive. Humm's book offers an engrossing and pleasurable overview of modernist women's engagement with the new technologies of photography and cinema. It is full of myriad fascinating details and is visually appealing. It has thick glossy pages and features many black and white photographs. Imaginative and original interpretations supported by careful and insightful readings of both images and texts make this book an indispensable resouce for students not only of Woolf, but also of Modernism, visual culture, gender, and the complex relations among them. A beautifully presented text [which] will have a great impact not only on the position of Woolf and other modernist women and their role in and for the modernist tradtion, but also on the ways we can read the interrelations between the textual and visual. Humm's book is most valuable in its detailed discussions of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen's early and long-lasting fascination with photography. Here her argument that photographs are carriers of gendered memories is original and persuasive. Humm's book offers an engrossing and pleasurable overview of modernist women's engagement with the new technologies of photography and cinema. It is full of myriad fascinating details and is visually appealing. It has thick glossy pages and features many black and white photographs. Imaginative and original interpretations supported by careful and insightful readings of both images and texts make this book an indispensable resouce for students not only of Woolf, but also of Modernism, visual culture, gender, and the complex relations among them. A beautifully presented text [which] will have a great impact not only on the position of Woolf and other modernist women and their role in and for the modernist tradtion, but also on the ways we can read the interrelations between the textual and visual.

Humm's book is most valuable in its detailed discussions of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen's early and long-lasting fascination with photography. Here her argument that photographs are carriers of gendered memories is original and persuasive. Humm's book offers an engrossing and pleasurable overview of modernist women's engagement with the new technologies of photography and cinema. It is full of myriad fascinating details and is visually appealing. It has thick glossy pages and features many black and white photographs. Imaginative and original interpretations supported by careful and insightful readings of both images and texts make this book an indispensable resouce for students not only of Woolf, but also of Modernism, visual culture, gender, and the complex relations among them. A beautifully presented text [which] will have a great impact not only on the position of Woolf and other modernist women and their role in and for the modernist tradtion, but also on the ways we can read the interrelations between the textual and visual. Humm's book is most valuable in its detailed discussions of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen's early and long-lasting fascination with photography. Here her argument that photographs are carriers of gendered memories is original and persuasive. Humm's book offers an engrossing and pleasurable overview of modernist women's engagement with the new technologies of photography and cinema. It is full of myriad fascinating details and is visually appealing. It has thick glossy pages and features many black and white photographs. Imaginative and original interpretations supported by careful and insightful readings of both images and texts make this book an indispensable resouce for students not only of Woolf, but also of Modernism, visual culture, gender, and the complex relations among them. A beautifully presented text [which] will have a great impact not only on the position of Woolf and other modernist women and their role in and for the modernist tradtion, but also on the ways we can read the interrelations between the textual and visual.

Author Information

Maggie Humm is a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of East London. She is the author of many books including Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Tate Publishing & Rutgers University Press, 2006) and Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press & Rutgers University Press 2002).

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