By James Calloway

Thames & Hudson and the V&A have co-published Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, a 240-page survey by Fiona Rogers, the V&A's Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography. The book traces the cut as both technique and argument: a means of pulling photography apart so it speaks differently. For practitioners, that framing matters — Rogers positions collage not as a stylistic option but as a sustained challenge to photography's claims of authority, visibility and possession.

Anneka French reviewed the book for 1000 Words on 2 July 2026 and read it as a wide-ranging account of feminist image-making that connects practices shaped by race, colonialism, climate and digital technology. The vast majority of the reproduced works come from the V&A's holdings, a collection of almost a million photographs. That institutional anchor gives the book weight; it also signals where curatorial attention at South Kensington is heading.

What does the cut make visible?

Lorna Simpson's Everrrything (2021), part of the ten-part series Sky Pin Ups (2021–present), sets the book's tone. A woman sits on a bed, legs folded, purple fabric at her waist; the rest of her body is cut away and rendered as a night sky, tiny bursts of starlight against black. The word 'VISIBLE' appears within the frame. Simpson reclaims the Black female body by stripping a sexualised image of its original context and rebuilding it cosmically. Alona Pardo's text on Simpson, in the chapter 'Feminisms', argues the women in these collages 'give form to speculative realms' and 'are the creators of their own universe' — a claim that holds across the book.

Helen Chadwick's The Oval Court (1986) extends the argument materially. The installation collages life-sized Prussian blue photocopies onto a low plinth, showing Chadwick's naked body among dead mammals, birds, insects and plant life. In one illustrated section, a small axe wound with rope lies against her stomach and crotch — a gesture French reads as referencing the violence, precision and creative potential of a sharp blade.

Who are the pioneers and experimenters?

The first chapter, 'Early Pioneers', gathers Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron and Edith Mary Paget, experimenters with cyanotype, photogram, multiple and cut negatives, watercolour and mixed-media collage. Reproduced plates include Cameron's Kate Dore with Photogram Frame of Ferns and Mabel Annie Burnip's hand-illustrated albumen albums from the 1870s.

Later chapters turn to bodily feminist concerns:

• Joy Gregory's cyanotypes interrogate the West's fixation on the female blonde.
• Joanne Leonard's Journal of a Miscarriage (1973) prints convey the visceral loss of a pregnancy.
• Linder's photomontages recontextualise pornographic and consumerist depictions of the female body.
• Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons appears through a photogravure in which eyes are 'tattooed' across her back, fusing voyeurism and ritual.

'Experimental Forms' delivers the anthology's best-known names, many recently the subject of major solo exhibitions. Claude Cahun appears through eight symbolically loaded pieces reprinted from half-plate negatives — Surrealist compositions of faces, eyes, hands, cacti, scissors and a chess game, including Aveux non Avenus (1930). Dora Maar's 1930s silver gelatin photomontages, among them Untitled (Hand Shell) (1934) and The Pretender (or The Simulator) (1935), show her meticulously rephotographing, cropping, reorienting and retouching motifs into enigmatic reinvention. Toshiko Okanoue's Fantasy (1953) and Modern History (1956), platinum-print photocollages, build on the torn-paper technique of chigiri-e.

How do artists reclaim history?

'Reclaiming Histories' gathers the book's most physically assertive work. Sasha Huber drives staples through the photographic surface, giving Black female subjects an armoured exterior. Joana Choumali embroiders prints to process a landscape in Côte d'Ivoire devastated by terrorism. Tarrah Krajnak's cyanotype self-portraits project political violence onto her Indigenous body, addressing dislocation from her birth city of Lima. Mickalene Thomas's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010) answers Manet's 1863 canvas directly; her other prints carry rhinestones, tape and fibreglass mesh — what curator Renée Mussai, in a longer text, calls the 'incandescent magic' of the practice.

'Speculative Futures' widens the frame to the digital and the climate crisis. Ventura Profana, a Brazilian artist using photomontage for divination, queering and climate justice, is included via the hyperreal digital montage Balm of Gilead (2020). Profana's words echo Pardo on Simpson: 'I have a world to build… and I'm not waiting around for this world to end before I begin to build the next.' The chapter also features Alberta Whittle, Noémie Goudal, an extended text by Pelumi Odubanjo on Wangechi Mutu's abstract mixed-media collages, and Liliana Farber's large-scale Isolarii (2022), which layers historical cartography with contemporary digital mapping to build 'data collages' shaped by borders, colonised territories and technologised perspectives.

Justine Kurland closes the book. Following Valerie Solanas, Kurland developed SCUMB — The Society for Cutting Up Men's Books — cutting and reconfiguring photobooks by canonical white male photographers into something new. Her manifesto extract pulls no punches: 'I thrive in the stagnant waste of your boring photography… I'm coming for you with a blade.'

For working photographers, Cut Out offers a lineage rather than a toolkit: Atkins's cut negatives through Huber's staples to Farber's data collages form a continuous argument that destruction is authorship. With the V&A co-publishing and most plates drawn from its near-million-photo collection, the book also marks an institutional commitment to women in photography that Rogers's curatorship seems set to deepen.