An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs
Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.
Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships. The Bloomsbury Photographs are not simply documents, but testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.
Maggie Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and emeritus professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her work on Bloomsbury includes Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts and her novel Talland House.
"Maggie Humm has changed the way we think about Bloomsbury. With The Bloomsbury Photographs, she helps us to consider then as if now". Charlie Porter, author of Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion
“This beautifully curated selection of photographs brings Bloomsbury letters and diaries to life. Maggie Humm’s ground-breaking analysis provides vivid and important new insights into the history of photography and the intricate workings of the Bloomsbury group.” Wendy Hitchmough, author of The Bloomsbury Look
“Maggie Humm is the acknowledged expert on Bloomsbury photography. Here she presents a rich array of photographs, many of them gratifyingly unfamiliar, while addressing the Social and technological histories of amateur photography alongside Bloomsbury’s various disruptions to the (heterosexual) ‘family album’.” Lisa Tickner, author of Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century
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