READ THIS: Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage by Elizabeth Siegel
We love love love the Met at Whom You Know and try to cover every new exhibit they come out with. Consistently they come out with the best presentations and they are our favorite museum in Manhattan. The greatness of the Met is not news to anyone in Manhattan! We think it is worth repeating though, as it is true. As we near our 3,000th post we started counting how many times we have featured our favorite brands. We noticed we have mentioned how much Peachy Deegan loves Star Vodka over 50 times (see our recent coverage of the Star Vodka/Prince's Ball depending on your perspective), and we have mentioned Clarins over 70 times (click here to see how fabulous their neck cream is). We are 99% sure we have covered every new opening at the Met since Whom You Know started, and they may take the cake with 101 post mentions of nearly 2,900 now. Yes, we LOVE the Met.
And we love Playing with Pictures! Here is our coverage of the actual exhibit, which we highly recommend:
We believe one of the best ways to remember and commemorate our favorite exhibits at the Met is by buying the corresponding book: then you can feel like you are at the Met even if you are in your own living room with the aid of the book and your imagination! Before there was Photoshop, there was photocollage. Cutting, pasting and altering images in today’s digital world simply requires a click of the mouse. It is easy to forget that the act of playing with pictures has a long, rich history. Though commonly celebrated as a modern art form, collage has its roots in the Victorian era. There is a lot to learn from this exhibit and this book.
In Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, Elizabeth Siegel explores a selection of whimsical, often surreal photomontages created in the late nineteenth century. Human heads on animal bodies, people in fanciful landscapes, faces that are deftly morphed into common household objects—these are among the Victorian experiments in photocollage seen and explained in this marvelous book. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale, these images flouted the serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s. Often made by women for albums, they reveal the educated minds and accomplished hands of their makers, taking on the new theory of evolution, addressing the changing role of photography, and challenging the strict conventions of aristocratic society. Although these photocollages may seem wonderfully modern to us now, the authors argue that they are actually perfectly in keeping with the Victorian sensibility that embraced juxtaposition and variety.
This delightful book, the first to examine comprehensively the little-known phenomenon of Victorian photocollage, presents imagery that has rarely—and, in many cases, never—been displayed or reproduced. Illuminating text provides a history of Victorian photocollage albums, identifies the common motifs found in them, and demonstrates the distinctly modern character of the medium, which paved the way for the future avant-garde potential of both photography and collage. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage by Elizabeth Siegel is a work of art in itself and we recommend it!
Whom You Know thanks our friends at Yale
TITLE: Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
AUTHOR: Elizabeth Siegel
ISBN: 978-0-300-14114-6 Paper over Board
PRICE: $45.00
PAGES: 200 pp., 40 b/w + 140 color illus.
PUBLICATION DATE: November 17, 2009
