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Fiona Rogers, "Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage" (Thames & Hudson, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with an author of a book just published in 2026 by Thames Hodson in collaboration with VNA Publishing, titled Cut Out A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, examining all sorts of interesting ways that techniques have been used by a variety of artists through, as the subtitle suggests, a feminist perspective. So we're going to be talking about all sorts of different kinds of images and methods of making them. I think we're going to have quite an intriguing conversation. So who better then to tell us all about the book than the person who wrote it? I have with me Fiona Rogers, who is here to tell us all about her work. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Could you start us off please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Yeah, so I'm Fiona Rogers. I am the VA Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It's a post I've had for four years. It's a fairly new role at the museum which sits in the photography section of the museum. And I was just. I was really interested in writing a book that celebrated the women in our collection. But I wanted to do a book that looked at the history of the collection from a kind of more specific angle than just something perhaps that was about gender. And I found this root into our collection through the history of collage and photomontage that hadn't been told before. And that was really exciting for me.
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Yeah, it's always really exciting to kind of, as you said, find a way in to something. And of course, what we're finding a way into here is, as you've mentioned, a collection. So can you tell us more about this V and a collection you're drawing on?
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Yeah. So we always say that photography is at the heart of the VA because the museum was founded in 1852 and its founder, Sir Henry Cole, was collecting photographs even back then. So we always like to think of photography, photography as being kind of one of the most contemporary things about the museum. And it's got a really rich holding of 19th century material. But more recently, we've been collecting much more contemporary work. And photography exists a lot around the museum. So there's a lot of departments like our theatre and performance department or our Asia department who have photographs that kind of exist as a sort of record. But our collection is more photography that has been either collected as a sort of scientific or educational or fine art medium. And we now probably have about a million photographs in our collection alone. And that spans everything from 19th century all the way up to the present day. And in 2023, we opened the new photography center, which is now seven galleries where you can come and everything from a history of photography all the way to, you know, contemporary artistic commissions and objects from our collection.
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Okay, that sounds quite cool, but seven galleries and probably some stuff behind the scenes that's not on display. I mean, that's a pretty massive archive. So how did you decide what and who to focus on for this book? I mean, thankfully, the book is quite readable. It's not 3,000 pages long. So how did you do that?
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Oh, I'm glad you said that. Yeah. So I. So I'm obviously the curator of Women in Photography, and I have an interest in feminist and female social histories. And I've been looking for an entry point into the collection that would surface some of the women in our collection. And I came across this amazing text from 1977 by two American artists, Miriam Shapiro and Melissa Meyer. And it was called Waste Not Want Not An Inquiry into what women saved and assembled femage. And it was basically talking about collage and indigenous folk art pre1912 and how women had always collected and saved things because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. And I thought, oh my God, that's it, that's the book. And I realized that a lot of the work that we've been collecting through the Parasol foundation project, but also our photography department more generally, was collage based. And I thought, wow, there's something here. And I started seeing collage, a photo montage everywhere in our collection. It seemed to be a really a practice that a lot of contemporary artists were using as well as a kind of, you know, a way to perhaps create worlds that weren't there or to sort of speculate on climate futures or ecology or, you know, about gender. And I just started looking at our collection slightly differently.
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That's always interesting to see, kind of when something jumps out at you and you're like, oh wait, now it's everywhere, right? It gives you plenty to look at and discuss in the book. So moving, I suppose, roughly chronologically, what actually is the sort of early moment of feminist collage? Like, who are some of the early pioneers of this technique? When are we talking?
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So the book kind of kicks off in the 1860s in our collection and in other collections like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Met, there are these amazing photo albums of women that were making photo montage and photo collage using carte de visites that they cut up and then they would stick into their albums in these really beautiful, elaborate watercolor settings. They're beautiful, but they're also kind of bizarre. The sort of pictures of women's family members kind of cut up, you know, decapitated. And then they'll stick them on some pictures of some illustrated ducks or in these, you know, beautiful kind of elaborate looking fans or playing cards. And, and they were, they were basically, the women were making these in their sort of domestic settings. So it becomes this kind of very early introduction, I guess, for, for women, certainly upper, upper class and wealthy women to kind of access photography. And they're making these, these, these things in domestic spaces. So they're. It's a kind of, in a way, it's a sort of performance. It's a performance of identity, of class, of wealth. And it's a way for. It links to the histories of, of cote du visy where people were kind of swapping. You'd go to somebody's house and you would swap your carte de Visie and it was a kind of, you know, it's a bit like a calling card. Queen Victoria was really into it. She had albums of, you know, sort of wealthy aristocratic people in her albums. And if you swapped it with, you know, the royal family, then that was considered to be, you know, the kind of height of social class. And so it's this sort of area where women are creating and maintaining, you know, these, in these very kind of male dominated worlds. It's a space for women to kind of perform identity, but also to perform social ambition and class climbing kind of extends out of the kind of feminine accomplishments. Dr. Freights an amazing book called Fragmentary Forms where she also looks at Collage kind of pre1912 and looks at a lot of cut and paste techniques or paper cutting or botanical studying that women did in the kind of 17th, 18th and then later in the 19th century. And then when photography gets introduced to Britain and the carte de visite arrives from France in 1854, that's really when you start to see women really kind of playing around with pictures.
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Yeah, that's interesting to see kind of how it's linked to other things some of these women, as you said, higher class women are doing at the time. But can we talk a little bit more about kind of why there is a class element to this? I mean, obviously at this point women, all women across social classes are operating within the patriarchy. So like, why is this something that mainly upper class women are doing?
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I think the simple answer is that photography was still quite expensive, you know, in the 1850s and the 1860s. I mean, it starts to become more accessible in the 1860s when the Cote de visite really becomes kind of commercialized. And there's a kind, there's an interesting link between, you know, industrial heritage and industrial commercialization and the revolution and how kind of commercial print presses allow for the kind of, for the expansion of these technologies, these print technologies and how that kind of then enter the homes. And there's some kind of interesting anecdotes that other writers have written about people like Patizio di Bello and, and Liz Siegel writes in her book Playing with Pictures, which is about 19th century albums, not specifically women, but mostly they are mostly women where they talk about how, you know, the very upper class aristocratic people suddenly felt that the democratization of photography was starting to become, you know, it was like it was entering the middle classes and then suddenly that was, you know, they had to find something else to occupy their. That would, you know, that would maintain these kind of these social class separations. I thought that was kind of interesting, how it is the work of, you know, the wealthy, but then it starts to. As it becomes cheaper and more affordable, it starts to be adopted by, you know, other. Other. Other class structures. And it kind of gets rejected in a way by. By the upper class who suddenly see it as kind of a little bit, you know, a little bit bourgeois, a little bit cheap.
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Yes, of course, with many transitions when technology becomes more accessible, obviously price, then, is one factor that makes photomontage popular in the early 20th century. It's more available to more people. What were some of the other reasons, though, that it was especially popular in this moment? You discuss in the book that kind of. There's a lot of other things happening at this time that makes photo montage perhaps seem a particularly relevant way.
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Do you mean in the 20th century on. 19th? Yeah. Yeah. I think as at the turn of the century photo collage, photomontage becomes quite popular for different modernist art groups. Dada, the Surrealists, Russian Constructivists. And I think it's partly something to do with, again, this kind of. This history of how accessible photography is. And obviously by that point, by the early 20th century, it's even more accessible than it was perhaps in the 1850s. But I think there's something about the subversion of photography and photographic histories that the modernists are specifically interested in. I think they were very interested in taking this idea about photography as a tool of recording or documenting. And I think they like the idea of, like, flipping that on its head and saying, okay, well, if this is supposed to be truth, then, you know, what does it mean if I do this, if I cut it up? And I think that that was, you know, partly in direct response to a new decade, but also, you know, we're talking against the. About the backdrop of rising fascism, of the fallout of the First World War and then leading into the Second World War. So, you know, there's a lot of kind of politics at play. There's a lot of propaganda being. Being made both, you know, both pro and. And. And. And for certain governments. So I think that. That the modernists, I think, liked photography because it had a kind of relationship to. To truth. And I think they like the idea of kind of, you know, being provocative about the history of that use and flipping it.
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Yeah. I mean, I think probably the most interesting is. Is of course, Hannah Hoch, German Dada artists. I think always. What. What's. For me, what was fascinating about looking at hawk is that and sorry for my German pronunciation, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong, but I, I think what was interesting for me to look at. At her work was, you know, she was obviously probably one of the most famous of the Dada art movement, but even she has these amazing anecdotes where, you know, she talks about how the rest of the group who were mostly male, you know, they thought that they were kind of, they got treated as. There's this amazing quote from. From her where she's, you know, she's sort of talking about how they thought that, you know, that they were basically sort of amateurs, that they were just kind of dabbling in this, in this artwork. And also what I really loved about her history is that she, you know, she started off as a pattern maker and she was designing textiles for German women's magazines. And so I loved this link between this kind of craft history and her approach to photomontage and photo collage because she obviously recognized this idea about, you know, about craft and how significant craft techniques had been on women's making. But there's also really, there's other artists that came. Came to my attention in the process of doing this book that I that I didn't know about. You know, people like, there's a Hungarian artist called Elemene Mazowski. We acquired her work to two photo collages by her in. Well, they are attributed to her because actually the, you know, it's quite a fascinating story, but we don't really know what happened to her. She disappeared when the, when Budapest was, was invaded. And there's not much record about her since. But if the story is true and, and we hope it is, it's, it's a great, you know, she was an incredible artist. Cutting and pasting. You know, it feels very kind of, you know, the, the modernist symbolism is there in, in her photo collages. You know, it's a lot about the athletic body, it's a lot about kind of man and machine and industrial technologies. And there's some like, really amazing direct symbolism that you can, that you can see in, in the work. But, you know, we think that perhaps she, you know, hid these, hid these collages from, from, from public because, you know, because they are quite provocative. So, you know, we don't, we don't know what the story is exactly, but they're amazing. They're amazing artworks.
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I think the idea of provocative and kind of, as you mentioned earlier, poking at this idea of like, well, you say this is the one truth. How about. Right, like that's coming up a number of times, even throughout our discussion so far, right. With the Victorian upper class women kind of pushing back against what they're allowed to do. And now in the interwar period, you also talk about this after World War II, in that sort of period where especially in, you know, the UK or really the US there's this big narrative of kind of like victory, everything's better now, right? Consumer boom, baby boom. Yay. Can you tell us about some of the ways maybe that feminist artists were using these techniques to maybe push back against those sorts of narratives?
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Yeah, I think the kind of after post Second World War is quite an interesting time for artists because I think particularly women, you know, there was. Women had been such a, you know, their roles in society had fundamentally changed in a way with the Second World War. And suddenly, I mean, we're talking mostly about you know, white middle to upper class women. I mean, a lot of working class women and a lot of people of color have been, you know, doing the, doing these, these dual identities for a long time. But let's say that, you know, post that period, there's a lot more people that had now had these dual roles as, as doing, as doing work that, you know, had traditionally been done by, by men. And I think, you know, the sort of history of second. The rise of second wave feminism kind of tells us that people didn't want to go back to domestic roles. People had found a new level of freedom in the, in the workplace and with, with the roles that, that they'd, they'd gotten used to having that. People didn't want to go back to just, you know, childcare or being, you know, restricted to, you know, singular roles within the home. And so I think the, the. The work of the second wave feminists in the, in the 60s and 70s, it really, it sort of reflects that, that kind of push back against these sorts of, you know, these perceptions about, you know, a woman's place and, you know, where, where that exists, whether that's, you know, in terms of identity or roles. And I think a lot of the work, you can see a lot of parallels with the, with the modernists. I think, you know, you've got people like Martha Rosler. You can always see a lot of kind of d. I always think you see a lot of Dada influence in, in that kind of work because it's using a lot of, again, this, you see this use of media, available media, whether it's, you know, luxury lifestyle magazines or Home and Garden or Vogue, you know, it's, it's that. It's those kinds of accessible material that starts to get, you know, utilized and then, and then subverted to create these, you know, these provocative artworks that kind of question women's place or, or stuff that was happening in society. I mean, you know, we're obviously talking about some other, you know, other political things that were happening at the time, like, you know, the Vietnam War. And yeah, I think there was a lot of people that were interested in, in how photomontage could, could kind of question the, you know, what was happening in society in a way that felt, felt provocative, but also had direct links back to things that people understood, like mass media and like magazine culture.
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And I mean, you obviously mentioned two really big things there. Second wave feminism and the Vietnam War. Can we also talk about the ways in which some of these artists are maybe asking questions about anti colonial politics, decolonial politics, and kind of the extent to which like, photographs and archives can be used for those kinds of projects.
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Yeah, so I think what the second wave feminists did is kind of create a pathway for artists to imagine. Use photomontage in a way where you could imagine scenarios that didn't exist. And that I think has been very helpful for artists who are interested in, you know, decolonizing narratives or queer narratives to kind of add a section of history that perhaps wasn't there or has been erased or has been missed or glossed over. And so we have, you know, there's really great examples, you know, this is kind of these speculative futures I guess in a way, I mean, there's artists that are using photo collage to kind of invent histories, histories of sort of, you know, perhaps, perhaps black art history that has been eradicated. People like Maud Salter. There's also people like contemporary artists like Sasha Huber, who uses actually quite a. Quite an unusual technique where she uses staples to kind of collage to sort of create a layer over 19th century colonial photographs of enslaved people. And so I think a little bit like the Dada artists and the modernists who were also doing this to kind of world build or create imagined identities or imagined scenarios, photo collage, I think for contemporary artists becomes a really good tool for creating or inserting new identities or new histories.
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Very interesting to see that this is not just something you see in the historical archive, but is very much kind of continuing. Are there any particular artists maybe that we want to discuss who are using these techniques to think about the past and also maybe think about the future now?
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B
Oh, yeah, that's a hard question. I mean, there's so many. I will say that one of the challenges in writing this book is that it is a book that is based on our collection. And so whilst we do have some amazing stuff, there's obviously a lot of. There's a lot of gaps. And so, you know, there's a lot of great artists that we don't have, like Lorna Simpson and Wancimutu and Mickalene Thomas that know it would have been. We have represented in the book. But they're, you know, they're doing incredible work and we found a way to include their, their work and their contributions to this story. But yeah, the challenge I think has been because it's a collections book, how, how you deal with these, with the omissions. But I also really love. I mean, there's too many to mention, but I'm a huge fan of Justine Kurland, American artist who has been cutting up her photobook library as a kind of feminist act to recalibrate kind of art histories and to. She. She calls it kind of purging this, you know, white male canon, canonical approach to photographic history. We have an amazing piece by her that's currently on display in American Photographs. And I also really love this amazing digital work by artists like Liliana Farber, who's originally from Uruguay, who makes these amazing digital maps. They're kind of stitched together, this very kind of colonial. These old colonial maps that she sort of re photographs and then stitches together or I mean, Daphne Talma as she cuts up her negatives and creates these kind of fantastical new landscapes. Yeah, so many, so many artists, which is exciting, right?
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To hear about people doing currently this kind of work and having this book to kind of make better sense of what has gone on before them. That feeds into what's happening now. But of course, the book is now off your desk out in the world for anyone who wants to investigate this.
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Terrifying.
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Is there anything you're currently working on, book or not, related or not, that you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [27:28]
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Well, I'm currently doing a six artist commission. It's a feminist postal art commission and it's in response to a 1977 British postal art commission project called Feministo. And because it was the anniversary in 2027, I've invited six artists to sort of respond to this idea. And in a way it's, it's a, in a way, it kind of speaks to a lot of the themes that were in Cutout. There's this idea about working in domestic spaces and, you know, accessibility, collecting things, memory and networking that I think is. I'm really interested in that. And so I'm thinking about, yeah, the Domestic Space as a kind of site for women's, British women's photographic history.
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Well, that certainly sounds interesting. So best of luck to you and of course, the artists involved in that project. And while you all are thinking about those topics, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Cut A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, published by Thames and Hudson in collaboration with V and a Publishing in 2026. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thanks so much, Miranda. Thank you.
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