Victoria Olsen

 This image is part of a new and novel exhibition of Victorian Photocollage at the Art institute of Chicago this fall.  It's an example of the kind of constructed photographs that upper-middle-class and aristocratic women in England made and kept in scrapbooks to show friends.  The collages are amazingly creative, with fanciful backgrounds in watercolors competing with the formal black-and-white cut-out photographs.  But they remain eccentric and somewhat odd too.  For instance, because the figures are cut from different sources they are all to slight different scales, which makes the groupings unlikely.  Here, the woman in the lower right is strangely proportioned against the woman behind her, as are the couple seated together on the bench.  Yet the overarching tree frames the groupings well and the overall impression is one of elegance and refinement.  They are the products of a leisured and privileged lifestyle, and they demonstrate that very well.