Recently, I
was given the opportunity to design an event invitation for the Philadelphia on Stone book launch party on October 23 at The Library Company. As the party is
an ode to the great lithography of the Victorian era, I played with styles and
themes from the time period, namely Victorian photo-collage.
Victorian
photo-collage is a whimsical combination of photography, printmaking, and
painting popular in the family scrapbooks of aristocratic Victorian women in
the mid to late 19th century. One would find a cut-out of a
portrait, a head or a whole body, placed in a painted scene or combined with
lithographs. The scene could be somewhat realistic such as a drawing of a parlor
or garden, but often the scenes achieved a surrealistic quality and portraits
were placed in fantastical settings where heads did not match bodies, gravity was
not a law of physics, and inanimate objects took on a life of their own.
(click to enlarge)
When putting
together the invitation, I decided to take a more straightforward approach. I
created a digital collage using the photographic heads of prolific
lithographers and pen and ink drawings of their bodies, the library setting,
and the lithograph press. I can see why the practice was so popular because once
I combined the first photograph with my drawing I could not help but smile and
laugh. In an era where a photograph could not capture a smile due to the long
exposures needed, the whimsy of Victorian photo-collage brought a cheerful element
of play that was lacking into family albums.
Concetta Barbera
Digitization Technician
You can see more of my work here: http://www.growingdown.com
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