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Interesting
If you ever got thinking about this, here comes your answer.
A lesser-known art form allowed British aristocracy to circumvent rules of propriety, with in-jokes and suggestive messages hidden inside seemingly innocent images, writes Holly Williams in BBC.
Around 1860, Britain was gripped with a craze for cartes de visite – small photographic visiting cards, featuring staged portraits of the owner. It became de rigueur to swap cards, with even only vague acquaintances eagerly collecting each other's image for their scrapbooks. Making photocollages in dedicated albums – by cutting up those calling cards and repurposing them within watercolour painted backdrops, to often silly, surreal or even suggestive effect – became quite the fashionable activity for members of the British aristocracy. Admiring each other's albums in drawing rooms was a popular after-dinner pastime.
Per this BBC article the art of Victorian photocollage has become of increasing interest to photography and art history scholars, yet while a show at New York's Met Museum explored the topic more than a decade ago, no dedicated exhibition has ever been hosted in the UK. Many of these albums still lurk in British country homes, as yet undocumented by art historians, and this fascinating trend remains little-known to the general public.
There are many reasons for that, not least the fact that the people – mostly, but not exclusively, women – who made photocollages were doing so as a source of entertainment for their own social set, rather than creating artworks for display in a gallery. Photo collaging was considered an accomplishment, rather than a fine art.
See the link
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220114-the-surprising-ways-that-victorians-flirted