"...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.