Lady Filmer (1838–1903)

Lady Mary Georgina Filmer (1838–1903) was an early proponent of the art of photographic collage.

A Victorian socialite, Lady Filmer produced several albums consisting of watercolour scenes decorated with photomontages.

The Pastime of Victorian Cutups, “Playing With Pictures” refreshes our appreciation of the essential fuzziness of art history and of the collective, even osmotic nature of invention.

Cutout photographs into the albums of watercolors, sketches and writing that had long been an approved female leisure activity. Their hybrid medium was stimulated by an advance in photography: the invention of the carte-de-visite process, which was patented by the French photographer André Disdéri in 1854. A precursor of the photo-booth technique, it essentially democratized photography with small, cheap, multiple portraits, creating a rage for collecting and exchanging these so-called cartes de visite that came to be known as cardomania.

At the same time the cutting up and collaging of photographs devised by these women was a way of rising above cardomania by reversing the mechanical impersonality of photography and re-establishing it within handmade, time-consuming, implicitly upper-class works.

Needless to say, the photocollage approach brought a new specificity and bite to the homemade album format, creating richly freighted social and personal artifacts. Women could celebrate their children, illustrate family trees, demonstrate social connections, flirt with gentlemen other than their husbands and also show flashes of wit and mischievousness that didn’t always have other outlets. Real people enter the picture and are, literally and figuratively, moved about rather like pawns on a chessboard. Stylistically too. More than once you may find yourself thinking of the abrupt Victorian-flavored credits of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

The drawing room, a remarkably common motif in photocollage albums, was the site of display for women's domestic accomplishments. Also used in many instances were borrowed backdrops which afforded collagists the opportunity to place sitters in fantastical and dramatic settings.

The theme of travel suffuses Berkeley's album; here, photographs comically decorate luggage waiting to be loaded on a train. Berkeley's treatment of the umbrella might have been inspired by caricatures in Punch magazine in which heads were often paired with unlikely bodies, or by an illustration in an 1855 pamphlet produced by an umbrella manufacturer.

Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer (English, 1838-1903), Untitled Page from the Filmer Album.

In this scene, staged in her fashionably appointed drawing room, Lady Filmer depicts herself as a collector of photographs, standing close to her albums, pot of glue and paper knife. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, (a coveted guest whose presence was an impressive coup for any society hostess), leans jauntily against the table in the center of the room. Filmer and the prince enjoyed a well-known flirtation, one that was conducted in part through the exchange of photographs, and his picture appears frequently in her album. His large figure contrasts with that of her seemingly diminutive husband, Sir Edmund Filmer, who is seated near the dog in the lower-right corner. By placing the prince next to her albums, Lady Filmer hinted that these volumes played a role in her social success and that the prince might have enjoyed her visual games.