The Bloomsbury Photographs

An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs

Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.

Maggie Humm brings these photographs together to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships. The Bloomsbury photographs are not simply documents but testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.

Maggie Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and emeritus professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her work on Bloomsbury includes Feminist Criticism; Feminism and Film; Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema; Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts.