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
