• 1 1897 is the year when Virginia Stephen meticulously records her experiences with X-ray photography, (...)
• 2 They function as a Derridean archive, which ‘preserves its reference’ (Derrida 4).

3Woolf’s relation to photo images is multifaceted. There is first a rich family heritage, which constitutes the studium (Barthes) of her knowledge and practice of photography, namely the work of Julia Margaret Cameron or Leslie Stephen’s 1895 Photograph Album. But there is also what Richard Chalfen names the turn-of-the-twentieth-century ‘Kodak culture’ (Chalfen 9), François Brunet’s ‘Kodak revolution’ (Brunet 214), a domestic practice that Virginia Stephen documents in her youthful Hyde Park Gate News and her first diaries (mainly in 1897).1 Between theory, amateurism and actual praxis, Woolf’s intimate relationship to photography bears on contemporary French research into visual cultures, thus opening onto ethical as well as aesthetic debates. As humble craft, that is a ‘middlebrow’ (Bourdieu) or ‘vernacular’ (Chéroux) practice and a ‘conversational medium’ (Ghuntert), home-made photography documents and inventories2 the everyday experiences that are collected and hoarded in photo albums—Woolf’s Monk’s House Albums—which ‘rationalize’ (Rouillé 131) and order Woolf’s life story, thus connecting photography with her practice of (auto)biography, diaristic writing, her need for self-expression, self-presentation and the private recording of her daily life.

• 3 With Paintings in Proust, Eric Karpeles compiled all the Proustian pictorial references to create a (...)
• 4 ‘We have—through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film—been enormously enriched in (...)

4This corpus of images—images before the text—is completed by Woolf’s imaginary museum,3 a photographic culture encompassing 19^th-century Victorian Pictorialism and portrait-carte de visite as well as early 20th-century snapshot or avant-garde aesthetics. These build up a haunting photographic unconscious as László Moholy-Nagy defines it, 4 a photographic ‘third’, to borrow Liliane Louvel’s concept, which questions perception (optical or mental) and representation.

• 5 Woolf’s scrapbooks are kept at Sussex University Library (Monk’s House Papers).

5Additionally, photography participates in Woolf’s iconotexts. Thanks to the Hogarth Press, Woolf printed illustrated books (Willson Gordon) and included photographs in some of her own productions (Orlando, Flush, Roger Fry and Three Guineas). She also collected newspaper articles and press images for her 1930s scrapbooks.5 In these cases, rather than being mere redundant illustrations, the photographic images act as rhetorical tools that play with the text, actively contributing to building up the image-texts. And photographic visibility also translates into words, either through the literal metaphors Woolf uses in both her essays and fiction or through the implicit ones which adapt the photographic process or album design into writing. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, Woolf’s oeuvre gives evidence of photography’s ‘invisible revolution’ (Ortel 2002, 18) and of its modelling power as an ‘interpretant’ (21).

• 6 For Walter Benjamin, photography ‘makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious [sic], jus (...)
• 7 ‘Comment se construire un régime de visibilité ? Une époque déclare regardable et représentable ce (...)

6As Jacques Derrida rightly underlines, the ‘miracle’ of photography is to give ‘something to be seen’ (Derrida 3). It captures, reveals and preserves appearances but can also make the ‘unseen’ (Marion 11)6 visible. In its performance, photography produces a new regime of visibility7 which provides Woolf with ‘a third eye whose function it is to help out the other senses when they flag’ (Woolf 175). According to Maggie Humm, photography helped Woolf elaborate the ‘new language of modernism’, what Rancière calls the ‘image-sentence’ (Rancière 2009, 46), that is a linguistic practice which entails a certain idea of imageity and mobility (Rancière 2011, 49-50). Looking back on her own pioneering critical work, Humm draws on Woolf’s biography and literary strategies—both analogies (between literary descriptions and domestic photography) and adoptions (of the languages and methods of photography)—to see how photographs ‘enabled Woolf to see more clearly’ and structured her prose photographically. In Deleuze’s words, Woolf ‘is imbued to the core with a non-writer-becoming’. Becoming photographic, the Woolfian language ‘combines with something else, which is its own becoming’ (Deleuse & Parnet 44). Tracing her photographic genealogy back, Humm’s ‘Virginia Woolf and Photography’ gives an overview of Woolf studies on photography since the 1990s and ‘the turn to the visual’ up to the 2016 Société des Études Woolfiennes conference, Virginia Woolf and Images: Becoming Photographic.

• 8 Orain talks of a ‘Cameron phenomenon’ (Orain 9).
• 9 Woolf was Cameron’s first promoter: ‘Une première monographie lui est consacrée en 1926, à l’initia (...)
• 10 See Marion Dell’s analysis of Cameron’s link with Woolf’s visual writing.

7The articles presented here are a modest contribution to the field that aims at seeing how Woolf’s photographic vision shaped her literary aesthetics, her relation to language and characterization, and her approach of literary representation and life writing. In her 2002 Modernist Women and Visual Cultures, Humm analysed Woolf’s gendered photographic culture and how it influenced her modernist experiments. In her turn, art historian Hélène Orain focuses on Woolf’s ‘Aunt Julia’ (Nicolson 276), the iconic Victorian Pictorialist,8 and her ambivalent representation of women.9 What did this eminent forebear bequeath to her great niece?10 Was Cameron a figure of feminine emancipation or did she embody a truly Victorian spirit? Pondering over the atypical photographer’s life and work, Orain examines Cameron’s posture as female photographer together with her ‘anti-modern’ concerns and photographs. Reading the portrait of this puzzling figure, one sees how much Virginia Woolf’s complex relation to photography reactivates the problematic link between modernist aesthetics and the Victorian tradition and heritage.