Sixty years ahead of the avant-garde, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s on their heads.--from Playing with Pictures, Art Institute of Chicago
So sorry that we missed this 2010 exhibit (curated by Elizabeth Siegel) but were reminded of it this morning on Retronauts. Read a review of Playing With Pictures in the New York Times. Not all bunnies & hearts, those Victorians.
ciao-meow/the Management
(photographs via Retronaut)