excerpt from essay:

"Collecting Vintage Photo Albums - Musings on" by Barbara Levine

I open the cover slowly, feeling the rough nubbiness of the familiar (usually black) paper, sometimes crumbling in my hand. Photo albums are transformative. As soon as I open the cover there is a rush of feeling that something I was never meant to see is in my hands. As I turn the pages, I am activating a story. The pages of the album show the progression of time; they are not just about a single moment but rather they are about the accumulation of time. A narrative is building, faces are ageing, and often there is writing or drawings: someone is telling their story. When I turn the page I have no idea what to expect. There is a mysterious intimate pleasure in seeing how others have preserved their lives.

One album in particular caught my attention. It was a small album with a cut out illustration of a bride and groom on the first page and in black neat handwriting, was written “Mrs Wayman’s Album, 1910”. In a good number of pages there were seemingly redundant pictures of her with her Brownie box camera . Individually, the pictures themselves weren’t terribly interesting, but when you see five pictures on a page—basically the same image, her with her camera—she’s made a point of wanting us to know that she was into her camera and photography. As I turned the page, I found myself looking then at something completely different: an intimate picture of Mrs. Wayman reclining, napping—with a particular sense of casualness caused by the less-than-perfect blurred light source in the background. On the next page, figures are cut out and animated using collage techniques .There is a moodiness and variety with both the compositions of the photos and the placement and sequencing on the page. You just don’t know if it was naiveté or a kind of sophistication at work. It was all invention at the time. There were no photo books, no archetypes, or matrices. Each person was a lone ranger, compiling their own story by way of photographs.

Of course since Mrs. Wayman’s time, we’ve seen a lot of artists think in terms of layering and repetition—it’s become one of the calling cards of photography, particularly in the advent of faster films and motor drives. But in 1910 this was the point of origin. For example, there is the page in her album in which she has pasted two identical pictures (the only difference is one photo is larger than the other) of a man and a woman, presumably her, on the same page. She’s written under them respectively “Big Us” “Little Us. Is she unable to decide which is the better print size? Is she trying to make us laugh? Or is she addressing a conceptual question? It raises again my favorite question of photographic and visual literacy: how and when did it take shape? At the end of the nineteenth century people, lots of people (and there is virtually nothing other than an amateur in this instance) had a camera in their own hands. This is the birth of photographic literacy, and in this relatively short time, a time that might include, if we’re lucky, merely four generations, the subject and questions of photographic literacy have exploded around us.

By the time photograph albums emerged in 1900, just after the Brownie Camera became popular, people became less precious about photography. They started having fun with it, taking their cameras on picnics, on trips, to the farm, and to bed. Photography gradually became ubiquitous. But few people are schooled in making pictures. Mistakes happen and are preserved. Film, unlike painted portraiture, is cheap. Some of these accidents are through the eyes of the camera; it’s not always the person who calculated the particular “thing” that makes a picture curious, fetching, humorous. But it is the maker of the album—the one who has preserved it and woven moments together—that creates an illustrated story. These are, for all intents and purposes, pre-cinematic efforts.

People so loved their pictures that you can see the same one pasted again and again on a page. Unlike other media, they would even rip, shred, or draw across their pictures. That is fantastic, especially when you consider how unconventional that was. At the same time, George Eastman and his company, Kodak, were relentless in proffering just how pictures were to be taken. They did this by way of advertising and their monthly publication, Kodakery. It was only with time, lots of time, and forgiveness that people (and not all people) came to appreciate the unexpected. Because it was a hobby and a business, encouraging people to be creative became the norm.

Unlike an individual photograph, an album presents a design challenge. The page doesn’t dictate where those pictures are to go. I’m interested in where the maker put the pictures and how they sequenced them on the page and on the pages thereafter. In an album you are looking at so many things simultaneously—what the photographer sees, what the camera sees, and what the maker of the album sees. There are all kinds of albums, so many of them dearly conventional, but what I consider to be distinctive about my collection is the presence and expression of the unconventional imaginative voice.

People, myself included, are much more self-editing now. We have a visual literacy and a language that is, while broad and nuanced, very specific. Factoring in the full spectrum of new technologies and the very different ways in which photographic thinking has infiltrated our every moment, it has become increasingly dire to study these albums, ponder their creative reasons, and to save them. The early family-photograph albums show ideas of self-expression in their fledgling state that appear now everywhere, including digital technologies and bountiful blogs.

excerpt from Collecting Photo Albums - Musings on by Barbara Levine.  To read full essay and to purchase Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album: