The theme of the conference, which was held June 7-10 at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, was Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf.
Organized by Ann Martin, the event included the following plenary speakers:
What an age we live in. So many resources for the study of Virginia Woolf and her work are available online, and now we have another. The Monk’s House photograph albums, which include more than 1,000 photos taken by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and others, have been digitized by Harvard University library staff.
In the albums are snapshots taken by Woolf and her friends and family, including portraits and scenic landscapes of their homes and travels. Virginia and Vanessa were avid photographers, using a portable Kodak to shoot their pictures. They also developed their photos, printed them and mounted them in albums.
Vara Neverow tracked down the URLs for each album and asked Blogging Woolf to post them. And Stuart N. Clarke advises that you can find corrections and additions to the descriptions of the Greek photos in Martin Ferguson Smith’s, “Virginia Woolf’s Second Visit to Greece,” English Studies, XCII, 1 (2011), 55-83.
Please see the right sidebar under the heading “Digital Archives” for links to all five Monk’s House albums.
The set includes the German-born French photographer’s portraits of noted authors, including Virginia Woolf. Among the photos is one said to picture Woolf’s writing desk. This is not the same desk photo posted on Flikr by Renaud Camus that I wrote about two years ago.
Freund‘s book Gisele Freund, Photographer, published in the United States in 1985, includes 205 black and white and color photographs that document her 50-year career. Now out of print, it includes photo documentation of the popularity of Hitler among German students in the 1930s and the Depression in England.
It also includes portraits of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valery, Colette, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, , Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy. Many photos are accompanied by Freund’s personal notes and reminiscences.
It’s been a month since Princeton and the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre performed together at Woolf and the City, but like the blogger says, “its not like it un-happens after a month.”
A vegan blogger from Brooklyn has posted photos of the event. And while as a conference attendee I object to the accompanying Rumpus description of our group as mostly “wavy-haired, intellectual, modern-day Virginias with silk scarves and thick-rimmed glasses,” I am grateful that the photographer’s crowd shot puts the lie to that characterization.
Take a look. I guarantee you won’t see a single pair of thick-rimmed glasses.
Ryan Muir’s photos are fun, especially the ones of my faves, the cute little Princeton boys. They remind me of the Beatle boys of yesteryear.
But here I am, showing my age, even though I don’t wear thick-rimmed glasses.
