Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas

In Three Guineas Woolf includes five photographs of her masculine world: the army, lawyers, professors and church leaders which Woolf 'resists' with unpublished photographs: the narrator's memories of Spanish Civil War photographs. Where the public photographs erase individuality, the absent photographs encourage an alternative and radical politics. In private life Woolf was an active photographer very conscious of the links between memory, subjectivity and photography. Utilising ideas of memory and the visual from a range of writers including Pierre Nora, the article argues that the narrator's political argument is created by means of her embodiment in relation to the absent, not published, photographs.

Citation:
Humm, M. (2003) ‘Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas’ Signs, 28 (2) 645-663.