Work in progress view (2011) Artist in Residence Studio, V&A, London
"...Made Up Love Song is set quite consciously by the artist at the centre of a number of intersecting histories. In her chosen style and means of production, and in the delicate paring down of information in the images that might disclose a sense of time and place, Von Zwehl has created a photographic form that appears to exist outside time. And here, in this indeterminate portrait space, the jewelled miniature’s associations with the aristocracy and with the private economies of a social elite are intertwined with photography’s nineteenth century role in quasi-scientific modes of anthropological study . The pictures of Sophia cast an arc over these social connections, one than takes in the colonial past as well as the post-colonial present, and enfolds the V&A, too, both its Victorian heritage and the current institution, in a complex narrative that makes us think about about race, representation and power. Von Zwehl’s strategy over her thirty-four-image work is to conflate and amplify these echoes, but also to scramble them, to reform that history into a powerful contemporary statement". From the V&A publication: Made up Love Song, 2011 - extract from the introduction essay by David Chandler.
"It has been argued that the invention of photography killed the portrait miniature. Many miniaturists were forced to replace their fine brushes and pieces of ivory with a camera, backdrop and head-stand so as to keep their clientele. However, as Bettina von Zwehl's work so aptly demonstrates, photography did not kill miniature art. Portraiture's essence - its watchfulness and its concern - lives on, and continues to draw us in..." - Dr Hanneke Grootenboer, extract from the essay 'Private View' from the catalogue 'Ruby's Room: Photographic Miniatures by Bettina von Zwehl' (Holburne Museum, 2013)
