Excerpt from essay:

"Confessions of an Armchair Traveler" by Barbara Levine

I’m a peculiar traveler. My preferred form of transport is vintage travel albums. In page after page of these mostly anonymous albums, I am transported by a stranger’s spirit of adventure to faraway places in times long past. I board a steamship between Sri Lanka and Cairo; I cross the Alps from Italy to Switzerland by train or motor through Germany and northern Europe in an open car. I go abroad without ever leaving home. I don’t need to “be there.” I am happy here, in my armchair, turning the pages of an album steeped in age and history. It is this object—the album itself, what it represents and conveys to me here and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century—that moves me.

The invention of photography in 1839 transformed travel and the means to record it. Up until that time, we depended for our picture of the world on tales from explorers, ship captains, merchants, missionaries, and archaeologists. But their descriptions of extraordinary adventures filled with wondrous sights and exotic peoples were hard to corroborate. Not many people had ventured into the unknown; we were forced to place our trust in their credibility, memories, and reporting skills. With the advent of the camera, more reliable and detailed pictures became available. Intrepid professional photographers made pilgrimages to new continents and countries, wrestling with cumbersome photographic equipment and handling messy chemicals to bring back astonishing images. Suddenly we could see for ourselves what life, people, and landscape looked like in different parts of the world: it was, in a sense, the beginning of armchair travel.

From 1860 to 1920 practically every middle and upper-class home had a stereo viewer and a drawer full of stereo cards. These stereo viewers brought the wonders of the world—the Taj Majal, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower—right into your living room. The Keystone View Company’s ads claimed that “you can talk across the miles with your telephone—you can see around the world with your stereoscope—and take your family” (fig. 1). Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, in an 1859 article titled “The Stereograph and the Stereoscope,”

Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses....I scale the huge mountain-crystal that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops....I pace the length of the three Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbec...and then I dive into some mass of foliage...and leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the wealthy and a newly affluent middle class began to travel abroad in increasing numbers. I imagine their desire to travel was influenced not only by these stereo cards but also by seductive advertisements (figs. 2 & 3), or souvenir photographs made by commercial photographers. In these early days of leisure travel, it was common for tourists to buy fancy gilded albums already full of gorgeous photographs of the most popular sites, or a leather bound diary or scrapbook in which to write descriptions of their experiences and paste in their individually purchased souvenir views.

In addition to the increasing ease of travel, the early twentieth century brought another big change—the invention of the roll-film camera. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak Camera. This small box camera came pre-loaded with a 100-exposure film roll: when the roll of film was completed all you had to do was send the entire apparatus back to Kodak in Rochester, New York, where your film would be developed, new film would be loaded and everything would be returned to you. Several other camera models, including Kodak’s folding cameras, the Autographic, and the inexpensive Brownie camera, introduced in 1900, soon followed. All were all easy to use and small enough to take along in a suitcase or simply carry using the camera’s convenient strap. For the first time ever, leisure travelers could take their own snapshots of what they were seeing on their trips abroad. Back home, the travel album was born of the natural and inevitable desire to assemble their personal pictures and memorabilia for review and recollection. Tourists became the authors and archivists of their personal travel histories.

Travel albums are unique memory objects, serving as wondrous time-travel capsules and portals. They are in varying proportions diary, adventure story, scrapbook, and photograph album. Their makers strive for the perfect way to mix all these elements together in order to recapture, reflect, relive, and memorialize their experiences. Merely opening the album cover fires the memory and imagination, transporting the viewer (the album’s creator included), again and again to a specific place and time.

excerpt from Confessions of an Armchair Traveler by Barbara Levine. To read full essay or puchase the book.