Lady Clementina Hawarden: the silhouette motif in photographic art

1st June 2022 marked the bicentenary of the birth of pioneering photographer Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865), one of the most significant women to contribute to early photography. In this blog I highlight a specific genre within the extensive Hawarden photographic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concentrating on use of the silhouette as a stylistic motif in her photographic portraiture. Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, née Fleeming, left an extensive oeuvre of collodion photographic images marking her brief embrace of the

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Ann Gagné, “Race, Place, and Perspective in the Victorian Period”: VSAO Conference

Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca The end of the term at Ontario colleges and universities usually means instructors spending quality time with essays

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The Pinteresting Broken-Doll Aesthetic of Neo-Victorian Alices

By Amanda Lastoria, Simon Fraser University Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) endures as one of ‘the most popular children’s classics in the English language’[i], thanks to the creative vision and commercial savvy of Lewis Carroll and his contemporary publishers. Carroll created not just the Alice text, but the Alice books. Carroll was an art director. He oversaw the illustration, design and production of the first edition of Alice, and he (re)published the text in multiple editions that strategically segmented the

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Ethics and the Digital Archive: The Case for Visualizing H. Rider Haggard

By Kate Holterhoff, Carnegie Mellon University Over the past fifteen years, digitization has completely revised archival work. Digital texts introduce novel means of encountering the past because they simultaneously exist materially and ideally; everywhere and nowhere; in the past and the present. As NINEs and BRANCH founder Dino Felluga argues, ‘our current postmodern age tends toward dematerialization’ (308), or what Alan Liu of RoSE and Transliteracies calls ‘unit-detail atomism’ (84), suggesting that online archives are postmodern by virtue of their

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The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900

by Pearl Chaozon-Bauer University of California, Davis Upon entering “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900,” an exhibit at the Legion of Honor that features art work and pieces from poets, painters, sculptors, designers and architects who produced art for the sake of art, I expected to be intoxicated and affected by the beauty that the exhibit promised to deliver.  Since these artists championed the axiom that the only purpose of art is to be beautiful, I anticipated losing

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