Filmer, Lady Mary Georgiana (née Hill; 1838-1903), English aristocrat who used photographs in the 1860s to make mixed-media collages prefiguring the irony and ambiguity of 20th-century photomontage. The wife of Sir Edmund Filmer, she was considered a ‘fast woman’ in court circles because of a flirtation with the prince of Wales. In her collages, she plays with the connotations of collecting and exchanging photographs as a fashionable upper-class pursuit, associated with flirting and gossiping about possible affections. On one page from her album, now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, the prince's portrait is used with other male ‘heads’ to decorate the canopy of an umbrella, and again to fashion its handle, turning the future king into an accessory handled with casual intimacy. On other pages, pictures of handsome members of upper-class society are grouped in arrangements which seem to play with the truth of both photographs and affections.
— Patrizia di Bello
Bibliography
- Di Bello, P., ‘The Female Collector: Women's Photographic Albums in the 19th Century’,
Living Pictures ,1/2 (2001)
