Between Saying It and Seeing It

The Stephen Sisters' Photo Albums as a Testimony to the Renewal of the Narrative

This research project aims to assess the impact of everyday aesthetics on the reinvention of narrative, based on the Stephen sisters' photo albums.

Influenced by the work of their great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell produced several photo albums. Do these stand out from anonymous works? Do they relate to their respective artistic practices—writing for one, painting for the other—or are they merely a testament to a century marked by the emergence of new techniques that enabled the development and democratization of photography? Do they share an aesthetic affinity proportional to the special bond between the two sisters?

The focus will be primarily on assessing the impact of photography on literature and that of text on the snapshot, as well as what painting implies and provokes within the field of photography, thereby examining the very notion of the image through the lens of the Bloomsbury Group’s frenzy. It will also be an opportunity to understand the album as a visual grammar composed of photographs, texts, collages, and drawings, straddling the line between fiction and documentary—a fertile source of confusion for the construction of identities. Between saying and seeing, does the narrative presented by the Stephen sisters’ albums offer a pathway to a different way of thinking about ourselves?