Album-ing Feminist Historiographies: Techniques for Picturing the ‘Self-in-Relation’ within Matrilineal Lineages in the Work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf

Leaper, H ORCID: 0000-0001-9025-4896 Album-ing Feminist Historiographies: Techniques for Picturing the ‘Self-in-Relation’ within Matrilineal Lineages in the Work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf. Visual Resources an international journal on images and their uses. (Accepted)

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Abstract

As inheritors of photograph albums that Julia Margaret Cameron collaboratively created with her peers, the Stephen sisters developed as artists with access to a visual language rooted in sisterhood, encouraging them to explore what Nancy Chodorow terms the “self-in-relation” to maternal lineage. This article shows that through pioneering ‘album-ing’ as an intersubjective and intergenerational praxis, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf’s bodies of work dilate their maternal histories to works of recognised cultural significance. Their ‘album-ing’ techniques mobilized Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographic and album-making practices to construct matrilineal artistic narratives that create a matrifocal archive that reverberates across generations and genres. Album-ed works echo Cameron’s methods of sequencing and repetition to engender intimacy, reconfiguring ways of remembering their mother, and transforming the status of domestic photography from sentimental keepsake into a modernist strategy for feminist historiography. Their frequent re-staging of portraits of Julia Stephen by Cameron and other artists engineers a composite mode of self-portraiture that collapses temporal and generational boundaries, enabling explorations of experiences of mothering. This paper situates these practices within broader discourses on feminist art histories, affective inheritance, and intergenerational collaboration, drawing on the work of scholars such as Lisa Tickner, Maggie Humm, and Nancy Chodorow.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History
Divisions:	Art and Creative Industries
Date of acceptance:	7 July 2026
Date Deposited:	21 Oct 2026 13:23
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2026 13:23
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29723

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