"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."

- David Chandler, Extract from the essay 'A Song for Sophia' from 'Made Up Love Song' (V&A, 2013)