Modernist Women and Visual Cultures : Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema

This study offers an original approach to modernist visual aesthetics, drawing on a range of photographic and visual theory, psychoanalytic theories of the visual and modernist criticism as well as on original archive research.

The book covers the domestic photography of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the cinema writing of Colette, HD, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Bryher and the role of the visual in Virginia Woolf's "image/text" "Three Guineas".

Throughout, there is a concern with women's ways of looking and a critical exploration of how gendered subjectivities are visually constructed. The modernist women considered in the book owned "vest-pocket Kodaks" and were prolific photographers.

The book focuses in particular on the photographic practices of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and explores the photo albums compiled by them.

It includes many rare and fascinating images discovered among the archive collections of their photographs which have never been published before. The text shows the ways in which an evaluation of the visual is crucial to rethinking modernist aesthetics.

It examines a freer range of aesthetics which modernist women explored in domestic and cinema arts and asks what such an exploration tells us about gender and modernism.