Snapshot Chronicles : Inventing The American Photo Album
Barbara Levine , Stephanie Snyder

ISBN 9781568985572
10 x 10 inches (25.4 x 25.4 cm), Hardcover , 192 pages
576 color illustrations

Today, the photo album is something we practically take for granted, and "scrapbooking" is a billion dollar industry with its own television network. It was not always so. Before the camera, ordinary families had little more than the family Bible, a portrait of grandpa, and a drawer full of documents. Then Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie, giving Americans the means to document and record their daily lives. Hundreds of thousands of these cameras were pro- duced, and as a result small collections of photographs were assembled and preserved in an astonishing assortment of albums, with photographs as the raw material for collages, constructions, and text experiments.

Snapshot Chronicles is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera. Friends, family, travel, domestic life, special occasions, the workplace, farm and city life—these were all intermingled in early albums in surprising and dynamic forms. Men, women, and even children became the creators of their own visual biographies, and documenters of previously unprecedented aspects of American life.

Four essayists weave together the history of the photo album, making them not just a part of our past but a significant aspect of Americana. Snapshot Chronicles is designed by noted graphic designer Martin Venezky It Is Beautiful...Then Gone.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Curator and photo album collector Levine feels that whenever she opens an album she is "activating a story"—the annals of a family, the tale of middle-class striving, the story of Americans developing visual literacy and gaining fluency with photography's new idiom. Levine and fellow curator Snyder have produced far more than a catalogue to a San Francisco exhibition opening in April or a coffee-table book—they have made a beautiful, quirky history of photo albums. The green, velvety cover itself has the aura of an old-time album, and the scads of reproduced photographs are a visual feast. One album the editors highlight features the young Al Capone; others showcase anonymous happy families, college students, even the occasional chicken. The images are enriched by the editors' argument that photo albums embody the same impulse as quilts and embroidered samplers: all are narratives in pictures. Largely responsible for the creation of the photo album was George Eastman, whose company, Kodak, not only hawked the Brownie camera, but also created the cultural icon of the elegant matriarch who preserved family memories through the camera and album. Unfortunately, the print is small and difficult to read, making it likely that readers will simply flip through this fascinating and informative cultural history. (Feb. 2006)