The Madame B Album c. 1870s

Curator: Here we have “The Madame B Album,” created circa 1870s by Marie-Blanche Hennelle Fournier, combining drawing, colored pencil, print, and photography on paper. Editor: It’s odd, this circular, frame-like structure floating against a blank field. Somber almost. The reddish-brown colour suggests dried blood to me. Curator: Indeed, the limited palette certainly creates a unique affect. Let's examine its construction: a principal circle punctuated by smaller circular forms at each quadrant. The two upper circles contain miniature photographic portraits. Editor: They seem crammed in there, don’t they? The constraint of those tight circles, filled with multiple faces... It gives me a sense of social claustrophobia. Perhaps suggestive of societal pressures and the limited roles available to women of the era? Curator: An interesting reading! One might also interpret it formally: how the arrangement and geometry contribute to the piece's overall structural integrity, using the ovoid shape to create rhythm and balance in an otherwise sparse design. Editor: But the faces, they resist that clean formalist interpretation! They draw you in. Individuality fighting against imposed structure and anonymous space. What statements are embedded within such visual encoding, or decoding, regarding the politics and realities that governed their existences, and relationship to femininity in an oppressed world? Curator: Or we could understand this composition as a playful subversion of traditional portraiture conventions, disrupting norms and embracing abstraction through this unorthodox method? Editor: That's quite generous for the 1870's. The placement is everything; those trapped faces ask a rather significant question. Curator: As do any well executed symbolic artifacts. Well, whichever the method that interests our audience, it is a visual conundrum, and powerful object of great curiousity. Editor: It reminds me that within any framework, people and communities have lives, needs, and wants that seek some kind of liberation and space.