Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album [Hardcover]

Stephanie Snyder (Author), Barbara Levine (Author), Matthew Stadler (Author), Terry Toedtemeier (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1568985576 | ISBN-13: 978-1568985572 | Publication Date: January 19, 2006 | Edition: 1

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 produced, 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 lifethese 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).

Copublished with the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.

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. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

A handsome volume covered in the green suede-like fabric reminiscent of many of the old albums. -- Copley News Service, March 2006

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press and Reed College; 1 edition (January 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568985576
• ISBN-13: 978-1568985572
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 10.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,064,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History Your Imagination Will Appreciate, August 21, 2006

By 

G. L. Lugar (Pittsburgh, PA., USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (Hardcover)

This is a most interesting book, at least for people such as myself who have an interest in late 19th and early 20th century photography. Actually, I suspect it would also intrigue people who lack that enthusiasm but who have an interest in general social history of this period. A premise of the book is that photographs in albums are often times given added historical or literary meaning and visual interest by being placed into a personalized context by an arranger, compiler, and/or photographer. This context provides the photographs with an enhanced ability to create an historical account of a life, a portion of a life, an event, etc. - without being subservient to a text. Most of the albums presented do not have any substantial written commentary (and many have no written text other than labels for individual photographs), and rely on the images alone to provide the larger insights. The book is extensively and richly illustrated with examples drawn from the large and thoughtfully acquired collection of Barbara Levine. These examples illuminate and extend the clear and insightful commentary in the book.

The book also contains a very fine essay by the novelist Matthew Stadler discussing his ideas concerning the value of such albums that I was grateful to see, as these were ideas that would not likely have occurred to me, but were most insightful. This is a most pleasing inclusion.

The historical component of a picture is obviously improved by being placed in context. One of the most interesting features of this book then, is its visual demonstration of the wide variety of historical narrative styles that can be illustrated by albums, and even the way historical events can be illustrated without a "narrative" per se.

Definitely a valuable book for people who are interested in historical photographs. A small criticism, from my stand point is that I would have liked to have seen more albums filled with tintypes, but this is a _very_ trivial point when compared with the strengths of the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book Full of Possibilities, March 10, 2007

By 

N.H. Bookworm (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (Hardcover)

This book, for the reasons already mentioned by the other reviewers, is wonderful in its format and presentation of the information. I thoroughly enjoyed poring over the various albums presented and marveled at the unique creativity of each of their authors. As a person who creates scrapbooks, I admit feeling some sorrow that these albums have wandered far from their original "families," but at the same time, it gave me hope that there is an increasing respect for the folk art aspects of the "snapshot album" and that my albums -- if they go astray -- may someday be archived and revered like so many American handstitched quilts. So, I take solace in that the future my "art" is full of possibilities!

I have one small criticism: I would have liked to have seen the text printed in a slightly larger typeface. I found the small typeface difficult to read with my aging eyes -- but, I persevered and read every word!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the beginnings of the American photo album as a type of social history, February 7, 2006

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (Hardcover)

The cover is velvet, like one of those fancy Victorian-era photo albums. "Snapshot Chronicles" accompanies an exhibition at Reed College of innumerable photographs collected by Barbara Levine. The photographs are kept together as they were in albums of their original owners; or in the case of those not going with an album, in groups of similarly pictured individuals or similar subject matter. The source of the photographs was the Kodak Brownie camera introduced as a consumer item in 1900. This quickly led to an explosion of photographs of friends, relatives, yards and neighborhoods, vacation scenes, and varied activities (much as the cell phone has spurred new kinds of communication these days, one assumes). The photos were kept in "vernacular" photo albums; whose charm to later generations is explained by Willard Morgan, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography in 1944, "The snapshot has become, in truth, a folk art, spontaneous, almost effortless, yet deeply expressive. It is an honest art...partly because it is simply more trouble to make an untrue picture than a true picture." The hundreds of simple, yet fetching snapshots were taken before the days when artists, photojournalists, advertisers, and propagandists started to make use of cameras for their own specialized ends. Thus, the guileless, popular, vernacular snapshots can be seen as an unwitting visual social history of the era too.