Collage

'The Fairy Wedding' was a hugely successful photograph by Mathew Brady portraying the midgets General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren on their wedding day, together with their attendants Commodore Nutt and the bride's sister, Minnie. Due to its popularity at the time of the wedding, it's a relatively common carte-de-visite today and copies of it regularly turn up on eBay. What sets this example apart is the photocollage of heads pasted over those of the original sitters. Some political comment is clearly intended, possibly of the Paris Commune, possibly of socialism in general, since three of the new heads are, I think, portraits of Henri Rochefort, Karl Marx and Léon Gambetta.