Scissors, glue and feminism - la Repubblica

Some time ago, a Fuji manager showed me the photographs that teenage customers were proudly posting on the company’s social channels. They were photo collages, made in the form of posters or entire albums, which the girls had created by mounting instant photographs with glue and scissors, those emitted like impertinent tongues from their Instax, together with newspaper clippings, tickets, stickers, written hand, even small objects. We were already in the midst of the dematerialized era, but an unsuspected quantity of adolescents, almost all girls, happily messed with the materiality of images. We discussed this desire for tangible images, in the era of stripped-down images. I didn’t find a convincing reason for this unexpected survival. Now maybe I have found it.

Thanks to Federica Muzzarelli, a careful and original teacher and scholar who for years has been exploring the transversal paths that run through the other half of photography, the one made by women. The book you have just written talks about this, that is, the ancient, bi-century-old alliance between scissors, glue and the soul of women: Photography and feminism between 19th and 20th centuries. Albums, diaries and scrapbooks.In which he rediscovers a more or less ignored, or underestimated history, the history of those artefacts that rested on the living room table, osmotic threshold between public and private, available to the curious visitor, objects to browse while holding them on his knees, to touch, to touch with the fingers, to be told while smiling. The romantic and Victorian albums, the scrapbooks where the photographs ended up cut out and pasted into naively studied compositions, together with flowers, drawings, clippings, calligraphies, watercolours.

They were non-linear narratives, overbearingly material, discreet glimmers through which the hostess, without allowing anything of herself that violated the rules of good manners, allowed glimpses of her own identity, interiority and imagination. “These diaries or scrapbooks were not just private or sentimental objects, but rather social tools thanks to which aristocratic women were able to build relationships and structure their identities,” summarizes Muzzarelli. They were performative objects. The way they were used, that is, shown and shared, mattered more than the way they were composed. And in this way they were transformed into a semi-clandestine space of freedom for women who were assigned a rigid protocol status by a repressive society. In short, even kitsch amateurism was converted into an instrument of subtle, silent, perhaps mocking conquest of an area of personal expression.

They were, even the albums, that “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf recommended girls to conquer. Naturally, that virtual room, that area of free expression, was then only within the reach of Victorian ladies who had the time to dedicate to it, and the financial resources to obtain expensive raw materials. Thus, Muzzarelli talks to us about noblewomen or wealthy women of whom these complex conceptual mechanisms made with glue and scissors have remained: the first was Lady Caroline Edgcumbe, sister of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, who already in 1840 showed to Queen Victoria an album made with photographs of her brother; then here is Lady Georgiana Filmer, Giorgina Berkeley, and of course the great pioneer of intimate photography, the still famous Lady Clementina Hawarden, with her two favorite actresses, her daughters Isabella Grace and Clementina Maude, and the elegant but eroticized domestic set, and a little claustrophobic, in which he posed them.

Hawarden was a photographer. But after her death she wanted her to be just that. Her photographs were torn from the albums in which she had pasted them, then isolated like museum works, violently denying their function as fragments of a discursive apparatus that gave them a different, active, speaking meaning. The fact is that the private album, where photographs are mixed with other spurious images, makes purist photologists very uncomfortable. The album destroys many of their assumptions, Muzzarelli explains. It dissolves the photographer’s authorship. It sabotages the photographic medium’s claim to realism. It downgrades individual images from works to words of a speech. He rejects the framing and exhibition system of fine arts. In this kind of communicating objects with a purely conceptual functioning, the author is no longer the one who produced the image, but the one who put it in relation to the others, and to his own vision of the world: “The editing works like a real work creative, since when assembled in the right position each element loses its autonomy and its discrete value, assuming meaning only as part of a new whole”.

Those ladies of DIY anticipated the poetics of the “work of fragments” that authors such as Walter Benjamin would theorize between the two world wars. Muzzarelli claims that everything with full rights to the genealogy of the feminist battle. Not because the women who composed those sentimental albums were conscious feminists. But because “an image can work for feminism without having been made for feminism”, and therefore “feminist photographs exist even more than feminist photographers”. After all, without those naive (but not too much) nineteenth-century creative experiments we would not have had the avant-garde courage of some great women, aware and militant, who made weapons out of scissors and glue for a challenge of gender, class, freedom, such as Claude Cahun and Hannah Höch, of whom Muzzarelli has always been passionate, and who reread here in a new key. To finally begin to move the eternal, somewhat idle question “is there a specific photograph of women?” away from discussions on essences, and within the historical contexts in which women, with different degrees of awareness, sought their spaces of expression.