Victorian Photocollage

I'm super excited about the Victorian Photocollage show at the Art Institute. I love how the formality of the portraits is subverted by the artists' whimsical hand. Here, family photographs are treated not as precious objects, but as media for artmaking. Through cutting and pasting, images of stern people in uncomfortable clothing are re-imagined as characters in surreal spaces. In one particularly strange image, family members become spiders and insects on a web.
The work feels contemporary, despite the fact that it was made by society ladies in the mid nineteenth century. It represents an non-neutral approach to framing a collection. Rather than simply present the photographs in a traditional album format, the women responsible for the collages created worlds around the images, thus injecting them with a highly personal narrative.