Bloomsbury in Photographs with Maggie Humm at Hatchards Piccadilly

We hope you are able to join us for a very special Bloomsbury “lantern show” this evening with author and academic Maggie Humm to celebrate the publication of The Bloomsbury 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.

As we will see this evening, Maggie Humm has curated a selection of these photographs 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 – revealing them to be more than simply documents; they are testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.

Professor Maggie Humm is Vice-Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of many monographs about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury; her novel Talland House is based on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.