In 2007, Dewi Lewis Publishing issued The Visitors, a clothbound hardback of ninety-six pages with sixty-four photographs by Charlotte Cory. Its point of departure is the carte de visite, the small photographic visiting card that became a Victorian enthusiasm. Such cards were manufactured in enormous numbers. They now surface frequently in junk shops, where they are treated as nearly worthless. The people in them were dressed in their best and posed for a posterity that has largely lost interest. Cory works directly with that problem of survival and neglect.
Her method is not restoration but replacement. She inserts animal heads into the place of the forgotten human faces, drawing on the preserved bodies of stuffed animals kept in museums. The resulting creatures are difficult to place: a tiger in full military regalia, a donkey slumped in a chair in an empty studio, a kangaroo with a cricket bat returning our gaze with indifference. The images are staged with enough precision that recognition keeps slipping, and that slippage is the subject.
Two histories of preservation run through the book. One is the photographic card, meant to hold a face against time. The other is the taxidermied animal, shot not with a camera but with a gun and mounted for display. Cory lets them reflect on each other: both are bodies held up for an audience that may no longer care, and both raise the question of what it means to be looked at after death. The sequence builds these encounters without resolving them.
Cory is also a novelist and a writer for BBC Radio, with three novels to her name, and her literary instincts are visible in the book’s construction. The Visitors is not a documentary survey of Victorian photography or a natural-history album. It is an invented side-show, assembled with wit and a distinct unease.
For collectors of contemporary photographic books, its interest lies in the coherence of that invention. Dewi Lewis has a long record in this field, and The Visitors shows an artist using the most disposable of photographic formats to ask durable questions about likeness, display, and the fate of the image. The result is a compact, unsettling book that rewards sustained attention.
