An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs
 
Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.
 
Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are blurred as if taken in a hurried moment of time, and unguarded close-ups reflect complex personal relationships. The Bloomsbury Photographs are not simply documents, but testimonies of relationships, friendships, and the significance of empathetic lives.

“The Bloomsbury Photographs [is] a curiously intimate experience. These may not be our relatives, but by the time we close this evocative book we feel a fleeting sense of loss.”—Vanessa Curtis, Times Literary Supplement

“The pictures are touching and peculiar and chronicle a gradual loosening of collars.”—Christian House, Sotheby’s

“It is a fresh portrayal and affords a delightful tangibility to familiar names and fabled history.”—Fiona McKenzie Johnston, House & Garden, “Best Coffee Table Books 2024”

“Full of surprises. A photo of Virginia Woolf louchely dragging on a cigarette will remain indelibly printed on my mind.”—Angela Wintle, Sussex Life

2025 American Writing Awards winner, photography category

2025 American Writing Awards finalist, academic education category

Maggie Humm is vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and emeritus professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her work on Bloomsbury includes Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema, The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts and her novel Talland House.