Blad afkomstig uit een fotoalbum, met 12 foto's (ongemonteerde carte-de-visites) en met inkt aangebrachte randversieringen c. 1865 - 1870

Curator: Alright, let's dive into this intriguing collage from around 1865-1870, credited to Lady Filmer. What strikes you first about it? Editor: Well, it’s a page from a photo album, a mixed-media work of mounted albumen prints. It has a kind of scrapbook vibe, almost like a Victorian version of a family’s Instagram feed, complete with, it looks like, hand-drawn borders in ink. What catches my eye, and I wonder if it's intentional, is the somewhat asymmetrical placement of the photographs; and what can we infer from these faces and portraits? Curator: Precisely! Think about it, each image, painstakingly posed and printed, now rearranged in a new composition of diamonds and squares. And what if those names scrawled beside them *were* comments? It is amazing that the artist’s personal touch in mounting and decorating elevated the humble photograph to something…more. Does it hint at anything symbolic about relationships, or power structures within a social circle, that she may have consciously decided to represent or unconsciously revealed? What feeling does the whole spread evoke for you? Editor: A sort of structured chaos. I’m curious about how Lady Filmer decided the layout and the selection process. There seems to be a hierarchy and intimate relations but also, some level of playful design with the embellishments. Do you think this page of photograph serves some form of a memory palace, too, to immortalize figures in her mind and to establish relations in physical spaces, maybe like a mnemonic to bring to mind each persona as each photograph is arranged with other portraits on this particular page? Curator: Oh, I love that – a memory palace! Maybe Lady Filmer was indeed building her own personalized architecture of memory and influence. The formal portraits contrasted against those colorful, whimsical borders… it’s as if she's breathing life into the stoicism of the photography with each red and green outline. What story can *we* invent for her about those relationships? I’m certain it'll make any audience’s experience and engagement a richer one. Editor: Thinking about it that way, seeing a playful Victorian influencer emerge, does help me connect with it and imagine my own place within that history. It shows us there is life even outside, behind the lens, and perhaps a new way of portraying personal art, through mixed mediums in particular! Curator: Exactly! These photographic scrapbooks are treasures where the formal meets the deeply personal, a tangible whisper of lives intersecting across a century and a half. A Victorian 'like' perhaps!