Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory parts. Cut Out by Fiona Rogers presents the previously untold relationship between photography, feminist art and collage, from the nineteenth century to the present day. In it, Rogers explores the relationship between photography and feminist collage, foregrounding the use of femmage – a radical reclaiming of craft traditionally associated with women – as a resilient method within feminist and political art.
Drawn entirely from Cut Out, this feature looks at six female pioneers who used collage and related photographic techniques to explore identity, authorship and social life across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working with albums, altered negatives, multiple exposures and photograms, these artists tested the limits of what photography could do and what it might express.
Seen together, their work reveals collage as a sustained and inventive photographic practice that shaped the medium from within, rather than operating at its edges.
Julia Margaret Cameron, Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of Ferns
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her pioneering and experimental portraits, which she began aged 48. Prior to making her own photographs, she compiled albums and printed photographs from existing negatives. This embellished photogram is originally by Swedish photographer Oscar G. Rejlander, who visited Cameron’s home on the Isle of Wight in the early 1860s. Rejlander was a pioneer of ‘combination printing’, which used more than one negative to create complex compositions. Cameron has placed ferns between the negative and the printing paper, perhaps to symbolize the delicate Victorian sensibility of the young woman.
This singular photogram appears to be unique in Cameron’s oeuvre. She is not known to have used this technique elsewhere in her work, although multiple and cut negatives feature.
Hannah Maynard (1834–1918)
Hannah Maynard emigrated from England in 1852, ultimately settling in Victoria, Canada, in 1862, where she opened her own photography studio: ‘Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery’. Maynard specialized in portraiture, but also worked for the government and as an ethnographic photographer, holding contracts with the Victoria Police Department to photograph officers and prisoners. Maynard was an avid experimenter, working with multiple exposures and her own self-image. Gems of British Columbia for the year 1884 is a notable series of innovative photomontages featuring portraits of children, which Maynard issued annually for seventeen years as an advertisement for her commercial practice. The project leveraged her reputation as a skilled photographer of babies and small children, and stands as an original contribution to the history of photography.
Claude Cahun, L: Aveux non Avenus R: vers 193, Photographies de Claude Cahun / Droits réservés
Claude Cahun (1894–1954)
Claude Cahun was a pioneering French artist, writer and queer theorist. Born Lucy Schwob, Cahun is the artist’s gender-neutral pseudonym, and their performative works often explore the concept of sexuality, identity and gender. The Surrealist photomontages Aveux non Avenus were made in collaboration with Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore, and featured in Cahun’s 1930 publication of the same name. The works include portraits, abstracted body parts, and symbols such as masks and chess pieces, collaged together to create dreamlike scenes. These works were reprinted from the original glass half-plate negatives, which were hidden during the German occupation of Jersey in 1940 and only rediscovered in 1971. Moore and Cahun were active resistance fighters and produced anti-war propaganda. Both were arrested and sentenced to death, but were freed after Jersey’s liberation in 1945.
Edith Mary Paget (d. 1889)
Edith Mary Paget likely started her photo album shortly after the birth of her only child, Ada, who features in various montages representing the piety of Victorian motherhood. Paget’s family were part of Britain’s social elite, and many of her album pages are filled with cut and pasted cartes-de-visite of notable individuals from the aristocracy and military. Unlike other ‘organized’ albums, Paget’s is more akin to a scrapbook; her creative approach drawing on a range of media and presenting several images together on the same page. Her witty, satirical compositions often allude to flirtatious behaviour, such as Captain Gibson attempting to catch Mrs Adderley in a butterfly net. Paget’s self-image – she was a renowned beauty – can often be seen in the centre of the action.
Elemérné Marsovszky (1895–1944), Untitled
Elemérné Marsovszky (1895–1944)
These collages are attributed to Elemérné Marsovszky, a Hungarian artist who produced surreal collages, photograms and photomontages in the 1930s. Little is known of her life, but it is believed that she worked with the architect Virgil Bierbauer and owned a photography studio in Budapest until her disappearance during the 1944 Nazi invasion. Her provocative, insightful collages reference the symbolism of Constructivist ‘agitational propaganda’ (agitprop) art, with strong graphic compositions and depictions of urbanization and industrialization. Marsovszky’s source material indicates a denunciation of rising fascism in Europe, including a portrait of the Swiss clown Grock, known to be a Nazi sympathizer, and a group of women reaching towards the emblem of a skull. This critical commentary leads us to believe that Marsovszky probably kept these works hidden from public view during her lifetime.
Kate Edith Gough (1856–1948)
Born into a wealthy family during the British Industrial Revolution, Kate Edith Gough created an album that reflects her tastes as an educated, erudite woman with a sense of humour and thirst for knowledge. Her photomontages combine skilled watercolours with typical genteel motifs of the Victorian period, including flowers, domestic interiors and leisure pursuits. References to her family and popular nineteenth-century pastimes (such as card games) are combined with wider societal commentary, including on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Several photomontages reference time spent in Tangiers, possibly due to her husband’s naval career. Gough also spent considerable time with her sisters, notably her identical twin Grace, who features extensively in these playful compositions.
Words by Fiona Rogers.
Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage is available now.
