Featured on PDR in the collection The “Madame B Album” (ca. 1870s)

The “Madame B Album” was not made for public viewing, though the artist spared no care on its design. The book is a leatherbound volume of some hundred photocollages. Victorians enjoyed their photos in myriad ways — trading, posing, and arranging, inscribing winking captions, customizing rings and lockets. Photocollage is part of this domestic feminine milieu, and yet separate from it; collagists treated the photo irreligiously, as raw material for artmaking, something to be used, and used up. There is no substantive distinction between nineteenth-century photocollage and collage as it is understood today.