Snapshot 12: Take My Lens

PRESS RELEASE:

--

Snapshot presents Snapshot 12: Take my Lens

This display presents a visual essay drawn from Dr Hana Leaper’s ongoing research for her forthcoming journal article Matrilineal Inheritance and the Album-ing of Julia Margaret Cameron, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf. Developed alongside Part 1 of the article, to be published with Visual Resources, the exhibition expands beyond the journal’s limit of ten images to explore how these works speak to one another, revealing a rich, interwoven matrilineal narrative across generations. Bringing together family photographs and artworks produced over an extended period, the display creates a rare opportunity to see these materials in dialogue for the first time.

Snapshot 12: ‘Take my Lens’ offers new feminist perspectives on the matrilineal connections linking Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). It traces how acts of remembrance and creative exchange passed between generations, revealing an evolving artistic dialogue rooted in family ties. This intergenerational conversation begins with Cameron’s gift of The Mia Album to her sister, Maria, a gesture that set in motion a rich legacy of shared visual and creative practice.

Cameron was a pioneering British portrait photographer, known for her experimental, imperfect and often deliberately unfocused approach, which produced images with a strikingly tactile, haptic quality. Her practice of assembling personalised photograph albums for family and friends grew into a shared creative tradition. Gaps, overlaps and shared points of reference invited participation from both contemporaries and later generations, and was enthusiastically taken up by her great‑nieces, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

Domestic photograph and album-making provided a vital space for Cameron’s family and the generations that followed to show their intimacy and creative closeness with one another through sharing artistic practices. The Mia album became a central site for this exchange, anchoring the renowned Bloomsbury-group siblings, painter Bell and her sister, the writer and publisher Virginia Woolf, in their explorations of matrilineal ancestry and artistic inheritance.

Their engagement with matrilineal inheritance was shaped by the early loss of their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen (1846–1895). Julia was Cameron’s niece, goddaughter and favourite model. Cameron’s many evocative photographs of their mother offered the Stephen sisters a rare model for women’s biographical portraiture produced by a woman artist, and a rare example of intergenerational connection between women through artistic practice. These images enabled the sisters to navigate the mythologies surrounding their mother’s memorialisation and laid the foundations for a matrilineal artistic tradition that continued to honour and connect women across generations.

Their intergenerational dialogue was also embodied in the figure of actress Ellen Terry (1847–1928). Terry’s connection to Cameron, role as muse to both the ‘Little Holland House’ circle of artists, and later to the Bloomsbury group inspired sustained artistic exchange across decades. Works featuring Terry, and later images of Bell’s daughter Angelica portraying Terry and characters from Woolf’s writing, continued to extend and strengthen these intergenerational creative bonds over time.

‘Snapshot 12’ traces the relationships between these women and the ways each generation’s artistic practice shaped and inspired the next. Presented across four vitrines, the display marks key points in Dr Leaper’s research, with each section functioning as a discrete moment while contributing to a cohesive, unfolding narrative. Though physically separated, the vitrines are connected through a storyline that encourages dialogue between them, echoing the intergenerational exchanges between Cameron, Bell, Woolf and their relations’ own creative exchanges.


Curatorial team 2026:
Petra Bukvic
Alice Dolan
Nakayla Myrie

--