Although Plath’s visual world is becoming better known, little has been done to recognize the archive of domestic and vernacular portraiture her writing animates and explores. There are several reasons for neglect of the varied, inter-mediated, inter-textual world of photographic mater­ials. Considering the immense scale of archived photographs available to scholars of Virginia Woolf or Robert Lowell – canonical writers to whom Plath is often compared – Plath photographs at institutional sites are limited and diffuse. Photographs in primary collections number in the dozens rather than hundreds. There is no synoptic archival image bank; many photographs of Plath herself are duplicated across various collections; copies appearing in biographies often repeat, often without attribution or dating, so they tend to float free from interpretive contexts. While the study of photography and literature has taken off in recent years, a writer’s personal or public photographic collections are still understood to constitute ‘ephemera’ of artistic bibliography – in nineteenth-century usage the ‘fluttering’ image – compared to the holographs, manuscripts or drafts, for which scholars have established genetic models and interpretive procedures. In addition, Plath’s scrapbooks and albums, potentially rich quarry for studying conjunctions of words and images in the writer’s own hand, raise particularly complex issues of archival preservation; once disassembled, as Plath’s scrapbooks have been, it is difficult for scholars to reconstruct the ‘little books’ of photos and script exactly as the maker had intended them.