Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums
By BARBARA LEVINE & KIRSTEN M. JENSEN. Princeton Architectural Press

The following review by Kristina Dunoski appeared in Afterimage (January '08, special issue on photography and the archive).

Around the World showcases photo albums fom about 1880 to 1930 that depict travels through Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. During this period, the photo album became a visual personal memori that developed through travelers first collecting souvenir photographs and later capturing images themselves with the first Kodak cameras.  The travelers archived these expeditions with not only photographs and text, but also with collected ephemera- maps, advertisements, news clippings, hotel receipts, menus, postage stamps, ship activity programs- that can be seen as adding another dimension to their memoirs.  The juxtaposition of the photographs and ephemera creates a modd that supplements the images and text; some elements are meticulously placed on the page while others are layered haphazardly.  Vera Talbot's 1924 album shows her two-year travels through Asia and Africa through pages wallpapered with photographs and minimal text.  As a result, the viewer enters her whirlwind, experiencing the cultures and meeting the inhabitants on each of her stops.

The authors call the found albums not only "aide-memoire(s)" but also "time machines" that allow present-day observers to see what the travelers saw and experienced by turning the pages.  This physical experience-holding an album and feeling its pages-is something that is lost in digital photography and storage.  Looking at these albums in an age of digital image capture makes one wonder if these analog memories will  be digitally archived for future use and enjoyment or if they will ultimately be lost.

The following review by Victoria C. Rowen appeared in the January 24th issue of the Barnes & Noble Spotlight Review.

While it's hard to picture from our tech-saturated perspective, there was a time when refrigerators were so newfangled that they came with a manual that was also a cookbook for use with this unheard-of device. Reading Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums is much like paging through one of these guides, as it reveals many aspects of voyaging it's hard to believe ever were novel. And travel from 1890 to 1930 -- the era represented here -- presented considerable challenges. Only those of means could consider the time and expense entailed by a long journey when even getting to the main attraction -- the Tour Eiffel, the Sphinx, the Venetian canals -- could take days or weeks by “motorcar,” rail, steamer, paddleboat, or ocean liner. As the authors point out, people often wanted to do what they already seen in other photographs, and so we see many posing atop mountain peaks or feeding the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. But what distinguishes one album from another are captions (“Before Kit got seasick!”) and ephemera such as pasted-in news clippings (“Governor Seized in a Raid”) and menus (lamb's head broth). Some travelers sought out edgier experiences, such as a public execution in Bangkok -- the attendee attaching photos within a discrete envelope. Page by page, this book provides pause-worthy marvels, best viewed across the lap of two close family members, ideally beside a glowing hearth, right at home.