Crafting Memory: Marian's Photograph Albums
Open now, discover a remarkable collection of photograph albums created and compiled by Lady Marian Alford at Belton. Crafting Memory: Marian's Photograph Albums offers a rare opportunity to see original albums and photographs made by Marian Alford in the 1860s and displayed here for the first time.
The exhibition draws on ongoing research into Belton's photography collections and reveals how photography became a powerful form of creative expression for Marian and her family. Through carefully crafted album pages, personal photographs and associated objects from the collection, visitors can explore the stories, relationships and artistic interests that shaped their lives.
Research into the albums is uncovering new insights into authorship, artistic practice and social networks across collections at Belton and further afield. The albums feature images by notable photographers like Camille Silvy and Alice Kerr as well as amateur photographs made by members of the Brownlow family. Questions of authorship remain an important area for future investigation, with many photographs offering exciting opportunities for research.
When encountering one of these incredible albums a few years ago I became fixated with their rich contents and yearned to know more about Marian’s network – which photographers were involved in making some of these images and what might the family relationship be to them? Who did Marian compile her albums for and how we can we share them today as they carry both photographic significance but also so many relatable qualities in their focus on friends, family and preserving memories.
Marian Alford was a gifted artist, writer and patron of the arts. A co-founder of the Royal School of Needlework, she championed the cultural and economic value of needlework, publishing a book on the subject in 1886. Visitors will encounter luxurious presentation albums with carte-de-visite portrait galleries carefully crafted by Marian as well as more intimate compilations of family life. Her artistic hand is evident throughout. Pages are enriched with the annotations and intricate decorative frames, hand-drawn in gold and coloured inks. Together, they reveal the album as a creative and highly personal way of preserving and shaping memory, experience and relationships.
Alongside original albums and photographs, Crafting Memory uses film, animation and sound to bring to life their contents and contexts. Visitors are invited to reflect on their own relationships with photographs and personal archives. At the end of the exhibition, opportunities for creative participation encourage slower looking, reflection and making.
We hold thousands of photograph albums across our places and I’m so keen for these to be far more explored and made accessible. Trying out ways to enable such engagement within our historic houses is exciting and I’ve long been wanting to show such potential through projection and sound. Hopefully people feel inspired by photography and the act of album making, and either sit down to reflect on their own images and maybe kickstart a desire to compile their own albums, or go home and start to think about those images which mean the most to them.
As cataloguing and research continue, Crafting Memory: Marian's Photograph Albums marks an important step in uncovering the significance of Belton's photography collections. The exhibition reveals not only the personal stories contained within the albums themselves, but wider cultural and international histories. Marian's carefully crafted pages invite us to reflect on how photographs and the practice of album-making shapes our understanding of ourselves, our histories and the memories we choose to preserve.
Our partners
We've teamed up with CEWE, Europe's leading photo printing company, to share more stories from the thousands of photographs in our collections.