Virginia Woolf and Visual Culture

Virginia Woolf’s work is shaped by her knowledge of, and fascination with, visual cultures. Orlando, Flush, and Three Guineas all contain photographs, and Woolf wrote about cinema and was an enthusiastic domestic photographer. Visual artefacts of all kinds ranging from Omega Workshop crafts to Hogarth Press book designs, are part of her visual landscape. The chapter discusses Woolf’s relation to visual cultures, in particular Woolf’s ‘Portraits’, essays, ‘The Cinema’, Flush and Three Guineas

Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas

In Three Guineas Woolf includes five photographs of her masculine world: the army, lawyers, professors and church leaders which Woolf 'resists' with unpublished photographs: the narrator's memories of Spanish Civil War photographs. Where the public photographs erase individuality, the absent photographs encourage an alternative and radical politics. In private life Woolf was an active photographer very conscious of the links between memory, subjectivity and photography. Utilising ideas of memory and the visual from a range of writers including Pierre Nora, the article argues that the narrator's political argument is created by means of her embodiment in relation to the absent, not published, photographs

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: "the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles"

Writing to Vanessa Bell in 1937, Woolf imagined ‘do you think we have the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles?’ From the age of fifteen, both Woolf and Bell took, developed and mounted photographs in albums throughout their careers. There are over 1,000 photographs in Woolf’s Monk’s House Albums and a similar number in the albums of Vanessa Bell. Both sisters wrote about photography and photography influenced their aesthetics and art. The modernist sisters used photography not simply as a documentary device but as a means of crossing the border between the visual and the unconscious. The photographs reveal Woolf and Bell’s struggles with the public and the private, with formal aesthetics and everyday moments. The albums offer a crucial insight into those psychic mechanisms structuring Woolf and Bell’s aesthetics. For example Bell’s erotic photographs of her naked children are her ‘unconscious optics’ as well as a record of her world. The paper shows how album photographs are vivid examples of Woolf and Bell’s ideas about aesthetics, the maternal, the erotic and identity

Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and the Maternal

In this book chapter originally presented as a plenary paper at the International Conference ‘Contemporary European Women Writers: Gender and Generation, March 30th to 1 April 2005 held by the University of Bath, Professor Humm discusses writings of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir as a maternal legacy for British feminist critics and activists. The chapter focuses on a crucial year for feminists in the 1970s: 1972 which saw the first publication of the paperback of The Second Sex. It touches on de Beauvoir’s debt to Woolf, and de Beauvoir’s literary critiques of masculinity and the maternal in The Second Sex, as well as British feminist reception of de Beauvoir and Woolf in that year. Woolf’s famous injunction in a Room of One’s Own that a woman writer “thinks through her mothers”, Woolf’s recovery of the lost mother in “A Sketch of the Past”, The Voyage Out, and Lily Briscoe’s reparative painting in To The Lighthouse are often cited as Woolf’s maternal imaginary. The chapter tells another story about maternal presences in Woolf’s own domestic photographs and in some professional photographs taken of Woolf, as well as Woolf’s debt to her mother Julia’s writing, particularly Julia’s Notes From Sick Rooms

"Memory Hole" or "Heterotopias"?: the Bloomsbury photographs

The chapter examines ways of reading photography in relation to selected examples from the archives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. It argues that the variety of the Bloomsbury photographs offered Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell many possibilities: a safe space from which to view past presences; imagined communities as well as – following Foucault - ‘heterotopias’, combining real and imagined spaces outside of the social. In addition, Vanessa Bell’s photographs when placed alongside her paintings, for example, the photographs and paintings of Studland Beach, offer further ways of understanding Bell’s representations of past and present, as well as prequels of her paintings

Editing Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Woolf and the Royal Academy

In this book chapter originally presented as a paper at the 18th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 19-22 2008 held by the University of Denver, Professor Humm discusses Virginia Woolf’s review of the Royal Academy 1919 summer exhibition “The Royal Academy,” in which she obscures the contribution of women artists as well as the significant date of the exhibition which was the first since the end of the war. Woolf’s review together with the 1919 exhibition itself, raises gender and political issues and presents a crucial case study of ambiguities in Woolf’s writings as well as in contemporary critical difficulties with “modernism” itself

My Own Ghost Met Me: Woolf’s 1930s Photographs, Death and Freud’s Acropolis

In this book chapter, originally presented as a plenary paper at the 14th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf ‘Back to Bloomsbury’. June 23rd to 26th held at the Institute of English Studies University of London, Professor Humm discusses Virginia Woolf’s 1930s photographs in relation to visits to the Acropolis made by both Woolf in the 1930s and 1906, and by Freud in 1904. Freud revisits the Acropolis in his mind in the 1930s in a long letter to Rolland. The chapter argues that Woolf’s obsession with death in this period and Freud’s analysis of his own fears in the letter have much in common; and that her photographs were for Woolf, as Freud’s letter was for him, a technology of memory, which Woolf uses to counter fears of death and loss of identity