ABSTRACT
A Victorian family’s photograph album can be personally and socially revealing to a degree at first little appreciated when the leather covers fall back to expose those distant reticent faces. As with graffiti scratched on ancient walls, the images frozen and preserved by the camera convey to the onlooker at first only a sense of fleeting vanities. There is little doubt, for instance, that the Waterlow album comes from the world of middle-class trade and commerce, though it is a family album, for the first portrait to greet is that of Mr Waterlow senior, a Finsbury stationer, joined by his wife. The exact and shiny images of the photographs are in contrast to the hand-drawn patterns and emphasise crudities and imperfections; at the same time the care implicit in these adornments of the page lends extra meaning to the photographs, an extra emotional dimension of familial links and attachments.
