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This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.

The last chapter begins by briefly discussing postwar developments in dramatic, documentary and animated film. Discourses of nationalist and imperialist identity might no longer be overtly manifested in these genres and media in the early postwar era, but they did not dissolve with the termination of war in 1945. One of the best examples of continuity is the image of the emperor, which survived—and indeed continues today—to serve as one of the most important constituents of nation and nationalism in postwar Japanese media and visual culture. To reinforce this point, the chapter turns to the well-known double portrait of Emperor Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur, which should be seen as a continuation of the wartime imperial portrait photograph. (120 words)

Chapter five reconceptualizes the notion of the tableau vivant by focusing on some of the encounters between film and photography, which are also marked by a fascination for bodies arrested in time. Particularly examining the film still of classical Hollywood films, this chapter traces the historical development of this photographic genre through an investigation of the statements made by ‘still men’ in trade journals throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of the film still, which implies a specific kind of light, focus, narrative, temporality and the instantaneous. Finally, it investigates how these elements were taken up by prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who have appropriated ‘cinematic’ formulas in their works since the 1970s, as well as by contemporary video artists who developed the ‘still film.’

This chapter investigates the ways in which late nineteenth century concerns about the unauthorised publication of women’s portraits (in advertising, greeting cards and magazines) led to the legal formulation of a right to privacy in the US. It examines the history of this right within debates concerning the 1888 Bill to Protect Ladies, prior to Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ seminal article, and connects claims to a right to privacy to the advent of the New Woman and women’s broader struggle for equal citizenship. It argues that despite its emphasis on ladylike “modesty” and “reserve”, the case of Roberson v Rochester Folding Box (which led to the enactment of the first privacy laws in the United States) can be read as the protest of a courageous young woman against the use of her photograph within advertising that transformed her into an anonymous “pretty” object of mass consumption. This chapter compares her objections to the masculine language of liberty and freedom espoused in Pavesich v New England Life Insurance Co. In most of the early cases, a right to privacy was employed by young women who objected to their images being handled and circulated by others.

This chapter examines the way the early photograph was historicized, analyzed and discussed by its early practitioners in reviews on photography in journals and newspapers that appeared in the 1840s. It argues that for early practitioners the photographic image was conceived to be very different from the image of the camera obscura. While in the camera obscura the image forms itself instantaneously and uniformly, the photograph develops through time. Thus the camera obscura image was always the same because it excluded time from its process of formation, whereas the photograph introduced time as a differentiating element into its form of production, resulting in a variety of contingent unaccountable effects. The chapter analyses Talbot’s botanical images, John Herschel’s vegetable photographs and Robert Hunt’s early histories of photography.

Chapter 1 explores the practices and semiotics of photograph albums. Across the twentieth century, making photograph albums moved from an elite to a popular form, and was especially popular among single young people. Familial and personal histories were curated through selecting photographs, arranging them on the page, and fixing their meaning through captioning. In order to unpack these themes in detail, the chapter focuses on photograph albums depicting three ‘ordinary’ Irish lives. These photograph collections can provide us with a host of information about Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century: about how people used a visual language to narrate their lives; received, assimilated, or resisted social and political discourses; and revealed or concealed family secrets. Each of the subjects made particular choices about the stories they told in their albums, drawing on photographic modes drawn from Kodak convention and the visual rhetoric of Ireland.